THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE
 
 (THE FRAMEWORK 
 OF HOME RULE 
 
 BY 
 
 ERSKINE CHILDERS 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 "THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS," "WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE," 
 
 "GERMAN INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CAVALRY" ; EDITOR OF VOL. v. OF THE 
 TIMES "HISTORY OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA," ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 1911 
 
 [All rights reserved] 
 
 fl
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGSS 
 
 INTRODUCTION - - vii xvi 
 
 I. THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA - - 1 20 
 
 IE. REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND - - 21 41 
 
 HI. GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT - - 42 59 
 
 IV. THE UNION ....... 6071 
 
 V. CANADA AND IRELAND - 72 104 
 
 VI. AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND - - 105 119 
 
 VII. SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND - 120 143 
 
 VHL THE ANALOGY - 144149 
 
 IX. IRELAND TO-DAY - 150187 
 
 X. THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE - 188 229 
 
 I. The Elements of the Problem - 188197 
 
 II. Federal or Colonial Home Rule - 198203 
 
 III. The Exclusion or Retention of Irish Members at 
 
 Westminster - - - 203213 
 
 IV. Irish Powers and their Bearing on Exclusion - 213 229 
 XI. UNION FINANCE ... . 230257 
 
 I. Before the Union - 230231 
 II. From the Union to the Financial Relations Com- 
 mission of 1894-1896 232239 
 III. The Financial Relations Commission of 1894-1896 - 239257 
 XII. THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION - 258279 
 I. Anglo-Irish Finance To-day - - 258264 
 II. Irish Expenditure - 264 274 
 III. Irish Revenue - - 274279 
 
 v
 
 VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAITKB PACKS 
 
 XIII. FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE - 280 306 
 
 I. The Essence of Home Rule - - 280281 
 
 IL The Deficit - 281286 
 
 III. Further Contribution to Imperial Services - - 286 
 
 IV. Ireland's Share of the National Debt - - 286 
 V. Ireland's Share of Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue - 287 
 
 VI. Irish Control of Customs and Excise - 287294 
 
 VII. Federal Finance 294300 
 
 VIII. Alternative Schemes of Home Rule Finance - - 300306 
 
 XIV. LAND PURCHASE FINANCE - 307321 
 
 I. Land Purchase Loans - 307319 
 
 H. Minor Loans to Ireland 319321 
 
 XV. THE IRISH CONSTITUTION - - 322338 
 
 CONCLUSION - - 339341 
 
 APPENDIX - - 342347 
 
 INDEX 348354
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 MY purpose in this volume is to advocate a definite scheme of 
 self-government for Ireland. That task necessarily involves 
 an historical as well as a constructive argument. It would 
 be truer, perhaps, to say that the greater part of the con- 
 structive case for Home Rule must necessarily be historical. 
 To postulate a vague acceptance of the principle of Home Rule, 
 and to proceed at once to the details of the Irish Constitution, 
 would be a waste of time and labour. It is impossible even 
 to attempt to plan the framework of a Home Rule Bill without 
 a tolerably close knowledge not only of Anglo-Irish relations, 
 but of the Imperial history of which they form a part. 
 The Act will succeed exactly in so far as it gives effect to the 
 lessons of experience. It will fail at every point where those 
 lessons are neglected. Constitutions which do not faithfully 
 reflect the experience of the sovereign power which accords 
 them, and of the peoples which have to live under them, are 
 at the best perilous experiments liable to defeat the end of their 
 framers. 
 
 I shall enter into history only so far as it is relevant to the 
 constitutional problem, using the comparative method, and 
 confining myself almost exclusively to the British Empire past 
 and present. For the purposes of the Irish controversy it is 
 unnecessary to travel farther. In one degree or another 
 every one of the vexed questions which make up the Irish 
 problem has arisen again and again within the circle of the 
 English-speaking races. As a nation we have a body of ex- 
 perience applicable to the case of Ireland incomparably greater 
 than that possessed by any other race in the world. If, from 
 timidity, prejudice, or sheer neglect, we fail to use it, we shall 
 earn the heavy censure reserved for those who sin against the 
 light. 
 
 For the comparative sketch I shall attempt, materials in 
 
 vii
 
 viii THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the shape of facts established beyond all controversy are 
 abundant. Colonial history, thanks to colonial freedom, is 
 almost wholly free from the distorting influence of political 
 passion. South African history alone will need revision hi the 
 light of recent events. When, under the alchemy of free 
 national institutions, Ireland has undergone the same trans- 
 formation as South Africa, her unhappy history will be 
 chronicled afresh with a juster sense of perspective and a 
 juster apportionment of responsibility for the calamities which 
 have befallen her. And yet, if we consider the field for 
 partisan bias which Irish history presents, the amount of 
 ground common to writers of all shades of political opinion is 
 now astonishingly large. The result, I think, is due mainly to 
 the good influence of that eminent historian and Unionist 
 politician, the late Professor Lecky. Indeed, an advocate of 
 Home Rule, nervously suspicious of tainted material, could 
 afford to rely solely on his " History of Ireland in the Eighteenth 
 Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," and "Clerical 
 Influences," * which are Nationalist textbooks, and, for quite 
 recent events, on " A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth 
 Century," by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present Unionist 
 Member for Salisbury. A strange circumstance ; but Ireland, 
 like all countries where political development has been forcibly 
 arrested from without, is a land of unending paradox. It is 
 only one of innumerable anomalies that Irish Nationalists 
 should use Unionist histories as propaganda for Nationalism ; 
 that the majority of Irish Unionists should insist on ignoring 
 all historical traditions save those which in any normal country 
 would long ago have been consigned by general consent to 
 oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown ; and 
 that Unionist writers such as those I have mentioned should 
 be able to reconcile their history and their politics only by a 
 pessimism with regard to the tendencies of human nature hi 
 general, or of Irish nature in particular, with which their own 
 historical teaching, founded on a true perception of cause and 
 effect, appears to be in direct contradiction. 
 
 The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not 
 of the verification, of facts ; of prophecy for the future, rather 
 
 * The two latter works were written by Mr. Lecky in his Nationalist youth 
 the first and greater work after he had become a Unionist. They form a 
 connected whole, however, and are not inconsistent with one another.
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 than of bare affirmation or negation. No one can presume to 
 determine such a question without a knowledge of how human 
 beings have been accustomed to act under similar circum- 
 stances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and the con- 
 temporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case 
 for the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and 
 that is precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet. For 
 Ireland in many ways is painfully abnormal. The most 
 cursory study of her institutions and social, economic, and 
 political life demonstrate that fact. The Unionist, fixing his 
 eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and ignoring their 
 fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a habit 
 of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth 
 of political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction 
 that Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-govern- 
 ment. In other words, he prescribes for the disease a per- 
 sistent application of the very treatment which has engendered 
 it. Whatever the result, there is a plausible answer. If 
 Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she deserve 
 freedom ? If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic 
 recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it. In 
 other words, if all that is healthy in the patient battles des- 
 perately and not in vain, first against irritant poison, and then 
 against soporific drugs, this healthy struggle for self-preserva- 
 tion is attributed not to native vitality, but to the bracing 
 regimen of coercive government. 
 
 This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, 
 is as old as the human race itself. Of all human passions, 
 that for political domination is the last to yield to reason. 
 Men are naturally inclined to attribute admitted social evils 
 to every cause religion, climate, race, congenital defects of char- 
 acter, the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence rather 
 than to the form of political institutions ; in other words, to 
 the organic structure of the community, and to rest the 
 security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of 
 the liberty of its component parts. If, in one case, their own 
 experience proves them wrong, they will go to the strangest 
 lengths of perversity in misreading their own experience, and 
 they will seek every imaginable pretext for distinguishing the 
 next case from its predecessor. Underlying all is a nervous 
 terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption that
 
 x THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under 
 the demoralizing influence of coercion. The British Empire 
 has grown, and continues to grow, in spite of this deeply rooted 
 political doctrine. Ireland is peculiar only in that her prox- 
 imity to the seat of power has exposed her for centuries to an 
 application of the doctrine in its most extreme form and with- 
 out any hope of escape through the merciful accidents to which 
 more fortunate communities owe their emancipation. Canada 
 owes her position in the Empire, and the Empire itself exists 
 in its present form to-day, owing to the accident that the 
 transcendantly important principle of responsible government 
 advocated by Lord Durham as a remedy for the anarchy and 
 stagnation in which he found both the British and the French 
 Provinces of Canada in 1838, did not require Imperial legis- 
 lation, and was established without the Parliamentary or 
 electoral sanction of Great Britain. Lord Durham was 
 derided as a visionary, and abused as unpatriotic for the 
 assertion of this simple principle. Far in advance of his time 
 as he was, he himself shrank from the full application of his 
 own lofty ideal, and consequently made one great, though 
 under the circumstances not a capital, mistake in his diagnosis, 
 and it was to that mistake only that Parliament gave legis- 
 lative effect in 1840. By one of the most melancholy ironies 
 in all history Ireland was the source of his error, so that the 
 Union of the Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians 
 themselves in 1867, was actually based on the success of the 
 Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a dangerous nationality. Did 
 the proof of the error in Canada induce Englishmen to question 
 the soundness of the precedent on which the error was based ? 
 On the contrary, the lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish 
 precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic 
 progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this 
 very day. It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective 
 effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent states- 
 men the significance of the Canadian parallel ; for it is only six 
 years ago that a Secretary of State for the Colonies penned a 
 despatch recommending for the Transvaal a form of govern- 
 ment similar to that which actually produced the Canadian 
 disorders of 1837, and supporting it by an argument whose 
 effect was not merely to resuscitate what time had proved to be 
 false in Durham's doctrine, but to discard what time had proved
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 to be true. As for Ireland herself, I know no more curious illus- 
 tration of the strong tendency, even on the part of the most 
 fair-minded men, to place that country outside the pale of 
 social or political science, and of the extreme reluctance to 
 judge its inhabitants by the elementary standards of human 
 conduct, than the book to which I referred above Mr. Locker- 
 Lampson's " A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth 
 Century." For what he admits to be the ruinous results of 
 British Government in the past, the author in the last few pages 
 of a lengthy volume has no better cure to suggest than a con- 
 tinuance of British government, and he defends this course by 
 a terse enumeration of the very phenomena which in Durham's 
 opinion rendered the grant of Home Rule to Canada imperative, 
 concluding with a paragraph which, with the substitution of 
 " Canada " for " Ireland," constitutes an admirably condensed 
 epitome of the arguments used both by politicians at home, and 
 the minorities in Canada, in favour of Durham's error and 
 against the truth he established. 
 
 Mr. Lecky represents a somewhat different school of thought, 
 and reached his Unionism by reasoning more profound and 
 consistent, but, on the other hand, wholly destructive of the 
 Imperial theory as held by the modern school of Imperialists. 
 His fear and distrust of democracy in all its forms and in all 
 lands* was such that he naturally dreaded Irish Nationalism, 
 which is a form of democratic revolt suppressed so long and 
 by such harsh methods as to exhibit features easily open to 
 criticism. But the gist of his argument would have applied 
 just as well to the political evolution of the self-governing 
 Colonies. Indeed, if he had lived to see the last Imperial 
 Conference, the pessimism of so clear a thinker would assuredly 
 have given way before the astounding contrast between those 
 countries in which his political philosophy had been abjured, 
 and the only white country in the Empire where by sheer force 
 it had been maintained intact. 
 
 If my only object in writing were to contribute something 
 toward the dissipation of the fears and doubts which render 
 it so hard to carry any measure, however small, of Home Rule 
 for Ireland, I should hope for little success. Practical men, 
 with a practical decision to make, rarely look outside the 
 immediate facts before them. Extremists, in a case like that 
 
 * See " Democracy and Liberty."
 
 xii THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of Ireland, are reluctant to take account of what Lord Morley 
 calls " the fundamental probabilities of civil society." Sir 
 Edward Carson would be more than human if he were to be 
 influenced by a demonstration that the case he makes against 
 Home Rule is the same as that made by the minority leaders, 
 not only in the French, but in the British Province of Canada. 
 Most of the minority to which he appeals would now regard as an 
 ill-timed paradox the view that the very vigour of their opposi- 
 tion to Home Rule is a better omen for the success of Home 
 Rule than that kind of sapless Nationalism, astonishingly rare 
 in Ireland under the circumstances, which is inclined to yield to 
 the insidious temptation of setting the " eleemosynary benefits " 
 to use Mr. Walter Long's phrase* derived from the British 
 connection above the need for self-help and self-reliance. The 
 real paradox is that any Irishmen, Unionist or Nationalist, 
 should tolerate advisers who, however sincere and patriotic, 
 avowedly regard Ireland as the parasite of Great Britain ; who 
 appeal to the lower nature of her people ; to the fears of one 
 section and the cupidity of both ; advising Unionists to rely 
 on British power and all Irishmen on British alms. A day 
 will come when the humiliation will be seen in its true light. 
 Even now, I do venture to appeal to that small but powerful 
 group of moderate Irish Unionists who, so far from fearing 
 revenge or soliciting charity, spend their whole lives in the 
 noble aim of uniting Irishmen of all creeds on a basis of common 
 endeavour for their own economic and spiritual salvation ; 
 who find their work checked in a thousand ways by the per- 
 petual maintenance of a seemingly barren and sentimental 
 agitation ; who distrust both the parties to this agitation ; but 
 who are reluctant to accept the view that, without the satis- 
 faction of the national claim, and without the national re- 
 sponsibility thereby conferred, their own aims can never be 
 fully attained. I should be happy indeed if I could do even a 
 little towards persuading some of these men that they mistake 
 cause and effect ; misinterpret what they resent ; misjudge 
 where they distrust, and in standing aloof from the battle for 
 
 * " Did the people of Ireland understand that the destruction of the 
 UnioTi, so lightly advocated by Lord Haldane, must result in the cessation 
 of those largely eleemosynary benefits to which the progress of Ireland is 
 due, her ' dissatisfaction ' would be unmistakably directed towards her false 
 advisers ?" Letter to the Belfast Telegraph, October 7, 1911, criticizing Lord 
 Haldane's preface to "Home llule Problems."
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 legislative autonomy, unconsciously concede a point dis- 
 interested, constructive optimists as they are to the interested 
 and destructive pessimism which, from Clare's savage insults 
 to Mr. Walter Long's contemptuous patronage, has always 
 lain at the root of British policy towards Ireland. 
 
 In the meantime, for those who like or dislike it, Home Rule 
 is imminent. We are face to face no longer with a highly 
 speculative, but with a vividly practical problem, raising 
 legislative and administrative questions of enormous practical 
 importance, and next year we shall be dealing with this problem 
 in an atmosphere of genuine reality totally unlike that of 1886, 
 when Home Rule was a startling novelty to the British elec- 
 torate, or of 1893, when the shadow of impending defeat 
 clouded debate and weakened counsel. It would be pleasant 
 to think that the time which has elapsed, besides greatly 
 mitigating anti-Irish prejudice, had been used for scientific 
 study and dispassionate discussion of the problem of Home 
 Rule. Unfortunately, after eighteen years the problem re- 
 mains almost exactly where it was. There are no detailed 
 proposals of an authoritative character in existence. No con- 
 crete scheme was submitted to the country in the recent elec- 
 tions. None is before the country now. The reason, of course, 
 is that the Irish question is still an acute party question, not 
 merely hi Ireland, but in Great Britain. Party passion in- 
 variably discourages patient constructive thought, and all 
 legislation associated with it suffers in consequence. Tactical 
 considerations, sometimes altogether irrelevant to the special 
 issue, have to be considered. In the case of Home Rule, when 
 the balance of parties is positively determined by the Irish vote, 
 the difficulty reaches its climax. It is idle to blame individuals. 
 We should blame the Union. So long as one island democracy 
 claims to determine the destinies of another island democracy, 
 of whose special needs and circumstances it is admittedly 
 ignorant, so long will both islands suffer. 
 
 This ignorance is not disputed. No Irish Unionist claims 
 that Great Britain should govern Ireland on the ground that 
 the British electorate, or even British statesmen, understand 
 Irish questions. On the contrary, in Ireland, at any rate, 
 their ignorance is a matter for satirical comment with all 
 parties. What he complains of is, that the British electorate 
 is beginning to carry its ignorance to the point of believing that
 
 xiv THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the Irish electorate is competent to decide Irish questions, 
 and in educating the British electorate he has hitherto devoted 
 himself exclusively to the eradication of this error. The 
 financial results of the Union are such that he is now being 
 cajoled into adding, " It is your money, not your wisdom, that 
 we want." Once more, an odd state of affairs, and some day 
 we shall all marvel in retrospect that the Union was so long 
 sustained by a separatist argument, reinforced in latter days 
 by such an inconsistent and unconscionable claim. 
 
 In the meantime, if only the present situation can be turned 
 to advantage, this crowning paradox is the most hopeful ele- 
 ment in the whole of a tangled question. It is not only that 
 the British elector is likely to revolt at once against the slur 
 upon his intelligence and the drain upon his purse, but that 
 Irish Unionism, once convinced of the tenacity and sincerity of 
 that revolt, is likely to undergo a dramatic and beneficent 
 transformation. If they are to have Home Rule, Irish 
 Unionists even those who now most heartily detest it will 
 want the best possible scheme of Home Rule, and the best 
 possible scheme is not likely to be the half measure which, 
 from no fault of the statesman responsible for it, tactical diffi- 
 culties may make inevitable. If the vital energy now poured 
 into sheer uncompromising opposition to the principles of Home 
 Rule could be transmuted into intellectual and moral effort 
 after the best form of Home Rule, I believe that the result 
 would be a drastic scheme. 
 
 Compromise enters more or less into the settlement of all 
 burning political questions. That is inevitable under the party 
 system ; but of all questions under the sun, Home Rule ques- 
 tions are the least susceptible of compromise so engendered. 
 The subject, in reality, is not suitable for settlement at West- 
 minster. This is a matter of experience, not of assertion. 
 Within the present bounds of the Empire no lasting Constitution 
 has ever been framed for a subordinate State to the moulding 
 of which Parliament, in the character of a party assembly, 
 contributed an active share. Constitutions which promote 
 prosperity and loyalty have actually or virtually been framed 
 by those who were to live under them. If circumstances make 
 it impossible to adopt this course for Ireland, let us nevertheless 
 remember that all the friction and enmity between the Mother 
 Country and subordinate States have arisen, not from the
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 absence, but from the inadequacy of self-governing powers. 
 Checks and restrictions, so far from benefiting Great Britain 
 or the Colonies, have damaged both hi different degrees, the 
 Colonies suffering most because these checks and restrictions 
 produce in the country submitted to them peculiar mischiefs 
 which exist neither under a despotic regime nor an unnatural 
 Legislative Union, fruitful of evil as both those systems are. 
 The damage is not evanescent, but is apt to bite deep into 
 national character and to survive the abolition of the institu- 
 tions which caused it. The Anglo-Irish Union was created 
 and has ever since been justified by a systematic defamation 
 of Irish character. If it is at length resolved to bury the 
 slander and trust Ireland, in the name of justice and reason let 
 the trust be complete and the institutions given her such as to 
 permit full play to her best instincts and tendencies, not such 
 as to deflect them into wrong paths. Let us be scrupulously 
 careful to avoid mistakes which might lead to a fresh campaign 
 of defamation like that waged against Canada, as well as 
 Ireland, between 1830 and 1840. 
 
 The position, I take it, is that most Irish Unionists still 
 count, rightly or wrongly, on defeating Home Rule, not only 
 hi the first Parliamentary battle, but by exciting public opinion 
 during the long period of subsequent delay which the Parlia- 
 ment Bill permits. Not until Home Rule is a moral certainty, 
 and perhaps not even then, do the extremists intend to con- 
 sider the Irish Constitution in a practical spirit. Surely this 
 is a perilous policy. Surely it must be so regarded by the 
 moderate men and there are many who, if Home Rule 
 comes, hi tend to throw their abilities into making it a success, 
 and who will be indispensable to Ireland at a moment of 
 supreme national importance. Irretrievable mistakes may be 
 made by too long a gamble with the chances of political war- 
 fare. Whatever the scheme produced, the extremists will 
 have to oppose it tooth and nail. If the measure is big, sound, 
 and generous, it will be necessary to attack its best features 
 with the greatest vigour ; to rely on beating up vague, anti- 
 separatist sentiment in Great Britain ; to represent Irish Pro- 
 testants as a timid race forced to shelter behind British 
 bayonets ; in short, to use all the arguments which, if Irish 
 Unionists were compelled to frame a Constitution themselves, 
 they would scorn to employ, and which, if grafted on the Act
 
 xvi THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 in the form of amendments, they themselves in after-years 
 might bitterly regret. Conversely, if the measure is a limited 
 one, it will be necessary to commend its worst features ; to 
 extol its eleemosynary side and all the infractions of liberty 
 which in actual practice they would find intolerably irksome. 
 Whatever happens, things will be said which are not meant, 
 and passions aroused which will be difficult to allay on the eve 
 of a crisis when Ireland will need the harmonious co-operation 
 of all her ablest sons. 
 
 If, behind the calculation of a victory within the next two 
 years, there lies the presentiment of an eventual defeat, let not 
 the thought be encouraged that a better form of Home Rule 
 is likely to come from a Tory than from a Liberal Govern- 
 ment. Many Irish Unionists regard the prospect of con- 
 tinued submission to a Liberal, or what they consider a semi- 
 Socialist, Government as the one consideration which would 
 reconcile them to Home Rule. No one can complain of that. 
 But they make a fatal mistake in denying Liberals credit for 
 understanding questions of Home Rule better than Tories. 
 That, again, is a matter of proved experience. Compare the 
 abortive Transvaal Constitution of 1905 with the reality of 
 1906, and measure the probable consequences of the former by 
 the actual results of the latter. Let them remember, too, that 
 every year which passes aggravates the financial difficulties 
 which imperil the future of Ireland. 
 
 The best hope of securing a final settlement of the Irish 
 question in the immediate future lies in promoting open dis- 
 cussion on the details of the Home Rule scheme, and of drawing 
 into that discussion all Irishmen and Englishmen who realize 
 the profound importance of the issue. This book is offered as 
 a small contribution to the controversy. 
 
 For help in writing it I am deeply indebted to many friends 
 on both sides of the Irish Channel, in Ireland to officials and 
 private persons, who have generously placed their experience 
 at my disposal ; while in England I owe particular thanks to 
 the Committee of which I had the honour to be a member, 
 which sat during the summer of this year under the chairman- 
 ship of Mr. Basil Williams, and which published the series of 
 essays called " Home Rule Problems." 
 
 E. C.
 
 EEEATA 
 
 SINCE this book went to press the Treasury has issued a revised version of 
 Return No. 220, 1911 [Revenue and Expenditure (England, Scotland, and 
 Ireland)], cancelling the Return issued in July, and correcting an error made 
 in it. It now appears that the "true" Excise revenue attributable to 
 Ireland from spirits in 1910-11 (with deductions made by the Treasury from 
 the sum actually collected in Ireland) should be 3,575,000, instead of 
 3,734,000, and that the total "true" Irish revenue in that year was, 
 therefore, 11,506,500, instead of 11,665,500. In other words, Irish 
 revenue for 1910-11 was over-estimated in the Return now cancelled by 
 159,000. 
 
 The error does not affect the Author's argument as expounded in 
 Chapters XII. and XIII. ; but it necessitates the correction of a number of 
 figures given by him, especially in Chapter XII., the principal change being 
 that the deficit in Irish revenue, as calculated on the mean of the two years 
 1909-10 and 1910-11, should actually be 1,392,000, instead of 1,312,500. 
 
 The full list of corrections is as follows : 
 
 Page 259, line 9, for "1,312,500," read "1,392,000." 
 
 Page 260, table, third column, line 6, for " 10,032,000," read " 9,952,500 "; 
 last line,/or " 1,312,500," read " 1,392,000." 
 
 Page 261, table, last column, last line but one, for "321,000," read 
 "162,000"; last line (total). for "329,780,970," read "329,621,970." 
 
 Page 262, line 7, for "10,032,000," read "9.952,500"; line 10, for 
 " 1,312,500," read " 1,392,000." 
 
 Page 275. table, last column, line 2, for "3,734,000," read "3,575,000 " ; 
 line 7. for "10,371,000," read "10,212,000"; line 14, for 
 "11,665,500," read, "11,506,500"; in text, last line but one of 
 page,/or "10,032,000," read "9,952,500." 
 
 Page 276, line 5, for "500,000," read "340,000"; table, last column, 
 line 2, for "3,316,000," read "3,236,500" ; line 3, for "6,182,000," 
 read "6,102,500"; line 9, for "8,737,500," read "8,658,000"; 
 lastline./or "10,032,000," read "9,952,500." 
 
 Page 277, line 2, for "1,672,500," read "1,752,000"; line 7, for 
 "1,312,500," read "1,392,000"; line 8, for "10,032,000," read 
 "9,952,500 " ; line 12, for " 1,672,500," read " 1,752,000 " ; foot- 
 note, line I, for "1,793,000," read "1,952,000." 
 
 Page 279, line 8, for " 7075," read " 70'48." 
 
 Page 282, sixth line from bottom, for " 1,312,500," read "1,392,000." 
 
 Page 246, line 8 and footnote, and page 295, lines 21-31 : A temporary 
 measure has been passed (Surplus Revenue Act, 1910), under which the 
 Surplus Commonwealth Revenue is returned to the States on a basis of 
 1 5s. per head of the population of each State. 
 
 Page 288, line 2, omit "like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands." These 
 islands have distinct local tariffs, but they cannot be said to be wholly 
 under local control.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF IBELAND AND AMEEICA 
 
 I. 
 
 IEELAND was the oldest and the nearest of the Colonies. We 
 are apt to forget that she was ever colonized, and that for a 
 long period, although styled a Kingdom, she was kept in a 
 position of commercial and political dependence inferior to 
 that of any Colony. Constitutional theory still blinds a 
 number of people to the fact that in actual practice Ireland is 
 still governed in many respects as a Colony, but on principles 
 which in all other white communities of the British Empire 
 are extinct. Like all Colonies, she has a Governor or Lord- 
 Lieutenant of her own, an Executive of her own, and a 
 complete system of separate Government Departments, but 
 her people, unlike the inhabitants of a self-governing Colony, 
 exercise no control over the administration. She possesses 
 no Legislature of her own, although in theory she is 
 supposed to possess sufficient legislative control over Irish 
 affairs through representation in the Imperial Parliament. 
 In practice, however, this control has always been, and still 
 remains, illusory, just as it would certainly have proved 
 illusory if conferred upon any Colony. It can be exercised 
 only by cumbrous, circuitous, and often profoundly unhealthy 
 methods ; and over a wide range of matters it cannot by any 
 method whatsoever be exercised at all. 
 
 To look behind mere technicalities to the spirit of govern- 
 ment, Ireland resembles one of that class of Crown Colonies 
 of which Jamaica and Malta are examples, where the in- 
 
 l
 
 2 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 habitants exercise no control over administration, and only 
 partial control over legislation.* 
 
 Why is this ? 
 
 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his 
 political judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when oppos- 
 ing the first reading of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home 
 Rule Bills. " Does anybody doubt," he said, " that if Ireland 
 were a thousand miles away from England she would not have 
 been long before this a self-governing Colony ?" Now this 
 was not a barren geographical truism, which might by way of 
 hypothesis be applied in identical terms to any fraction of the 
 United Kingdom say, for example, to that part of England 
 lying south of the Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made 
 any attempt to deny no one with the smallest knowledge of 
 history could have denied that Ireland, though only sixty 
 miles away from England, was less like England than any of 
 the self-governing Colonies then attached to the Crown, pos- 
 sessing distinct national characteristics which entitled her, in 
 theory at any rate, to demand, not merely colonial, but national 
 autonomy. On the contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of 
 his way to argue, with all the force and fire of an accomplished 
 debater, that the Bill was a highly dangerous measure pre- 
 cisely because, while granting Ireland a measure of autonomy, 
 it denied her some of the elementary powers, not only of 
 colonial, but of national States ; for instance, the full control 
 over taxation, which all self - governing Colonies possessed, 
 and the control over foreign policy, which is a national 
 attribute. The complementary step in his argument was 
 that, although nominally withheld by statute, these fuller 
 powers would be forcibly usurped by the future Irish Govern- 
 ment through the leverage offered by a subordinate Legisla- 
 ture and Executive, and that, once grasped, they would 
 be used to the injury of Great Britain and the minority in 
 Ireland. Ireland ("a fearful danger ") might arm, ally herself 
 with France, and, while submitting the Protestant minority 
 to cruel persecution, would retain enough national unity to 
 smite Britain hip and thigh, and so avenge the wrong of ages. 
 
 Even to the most ardent Unionist the case thus presented 
 
 * Class C. in Sir William Amon's classification, " Law and Custom of the 
 Constitution," p. 253.
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 3 
 
 must, in the year 1911, present a doubtful aspect. The 
 British entente with France, and the absence of the smallest 
 ascertainable sympathy between Ireland and Germany, he will 
 dismiss, perhaps, as points of minor importance, but he will 
 detect at once hi the argument an antagonism, natural enough 
 in 1893, between national and colonial attributes, and he will 
 remember, with inner misgivings, that his own party has 
 taken an especially active part during the last ten years in 
 furthering the claim of the self-governing Colonies to the 
 status of nationhood as an essential step in the furtherance of 
 Imperial unity. The word "nation," therefore, as applied 
 to Ireland, has lost some of its virtue as a deterrent to Home 
 Rule. Even the word " Colony " is becoming harmless ; for 
 every year that has passed since 1893 has made it more abun- 
 dantly clear that colonial freedom means colonial friendship ; 
 and, after all, friendship is more important than legal ties. In 
 one remarkable case, that of the conquered Dutch Republic 
 in South Africa, a flood of searching light has been thrown on 
 the significance of those phrases " nation " and " Colony." 
 There, as in Ireland, and originally in Canada, " national " 
 included racial characteristics, and colonial autonomy signified 
 national autonomy in a more accurate sense than in Australia 
 or Newfoundland. But we know now that it does not signify 
 either a racial tyranny within those nations, or a racial antipathy 
 to the Mother Country ; but, on the contrary, a reconciliation 
 of races within and friendship without. 
 
 Would Mr. Chamberlain recast his argument now ? Un- 
 happily, we shall not know. But it does seem to me that recent 
 history and his own temperament would force him to do so. 
 As in his abandonment of Free Trade, it was a strong and 
 sincere Imperialist instinct that eventually transformed him 
 from the advocate of provincial Home Rule into the relentless 
 enemy of Home Rule in any shape. Take the Imperial argu- 
 ment, shaken to its foundations by subsequent events, from the 
 case he stated in 1893, and what remains ? Two pleas only 
 first, the abnormality of Irishmen ; second, Ireland's proximity 
 to England. The first expresses the old traditional view that 
 Ireland is outside the pale of all human analogy ; the exception 
 to all rules ; her innate depravity and perversity such that 
 she would abuse power where others respect it, derive enmity
 
 4 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 where others derive friendship, and willingly ruin herself by 
 internal dissension and extravagant ambitions in order, if 
 possible, at the same time to ruin England. Unconnected, 
 however loosely, with the high Imperial argument, I do not 
 believe that this plea could have been used with sincerity by 
 Mr. Chamberlain even in 1893. He was a democrat, devoted 
 to the cause of enfranchising and trusting the people ; and this 
 plea was, after all, only the same anti-democratic argument 
 applied to Ireland, and tipped with racial venom, which had 
 been used for generations by most Tories and many Whigs 
 against any extension of popular power. Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, the Tory democrat, in his dispassionate moments, 
 always scouted it, resting his case against Home Rule on 
 different grounds. It was strange enough to see the argument 
 used by the Radical author of all the classic denunciations of 
 class ascendancy and the classic eulogies of the sense, forbear- 
 ance and generosity of free electorates. It was all the stranger 
 in that Mr. Chamberlain himself a few years before had com- 
 mitted himself to a scheme of restricted self-government for 
 Ireland, and in the debates on Mr. Gladstone's first Home 
 Rule Bill of 1886, when the condition of Ireland was far worse 
 than in 1893, had declared himself ready to give that country 
 a Constitution similar to that enjoyed by Quebec or Ontario 
 within the Dominion of Canada. But politics are politics. 
 Under the inexorable laws of the party game, politicians are 
 advocates and swell their indictments with every count which 
 will bear the light. The system works well enough in every 
 case but one the indictment of a fellow-nation for incapacity 
 to rule itself. There, both in Ireland and everywhere else, 
 as I shall show, it works incalculable mischief. Once com- 
 mitted irrevocably to the opposition of Mr. Gladstone's Bills, 
 Mr. Chamberlain, standing on Imperial ground, which seemed 
 to him and his followers firm enough then, used his unrivalled 
 debating powers to traduce and exasperate the Irish people 
 and their leaders by every device in his power. 
 
 One other point survives in its integrity from the case 
 made by Mr. Chamberlain in 1893, and that is the argument 
 about distance. Clearly this is a quite distinct contention 
 from the last ; for distance from any given point does not 
 by itself radically alter human nature. Australians are not
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 5 
 
 twice as good or twice as bad as South Africans because 
 they are twice as far from the Mother Country. " Does 
 anybody doubt" let me repeat his words "that if 
 Ireland were a thousand miles from England she would not 
 have been long before this a self-governing Colony ?" The 
 whole tragedy of Ireland lies in that " if " ; but the condition 
 is, without doubt, still unsatisfied. Ireland is still only sixty 
 miles away from the English shores, and the argument from 
 proximity, for what it is worth, is still plausible. To a vast 
 number of minds it still seems conclusive. Put the South 
 African parallel to the average moderate Unionist, half 
 disposed to admit the force of this analogy, he would never- 
 theless answer : "Ah, but Ireland is so near." Well, let us 
 join issue on the two grounds I have indicated the ground 
 of Irish abnormality, and the ground of Ireland's proximity. 
 It will be found, I think, that neither contention is tenable by 
 itself ; that a supporter of one unconsciously or consciously 
 reinforces it by reference to the other, and that to refute one 
 is to refute both. It will be found, too, that, apart from 
 mechanical and unessential difficulties, the whole case against 
 Home Rule is included and summed up in these two con- 
 tentions, and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly 
 eased and illuminated by their refutation. 
 
 II. 
 
 Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish 
 Channel if only every Englishman could realize their tre- 
 mendous significance in Anglo-Irish history what an in- 
 effectual barrier "in the long result of time " to colonization 
 and conquest ; what an impassable barrier through the ignor- 
 ance and perversity of British statesmanship to sympathy 
 and racial fusion ! 
 
 For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance 
 from Europe gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, 
 and freedom to work out her own destiny. She never, for 
 good or ill, underwent Roman occupation or Teutonic invasion. 
 She was secure enough to construct and maintain unimpaired 
 a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous, and marvel- 
 lously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture. She
 
 produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle 
 scholars and divines ; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, 
 theologians. She had a passion for diffusing knowledge, and 
 for more than a thousand years sent her missionaries of piety, 
 learning, art, and commerce, far and wide over Europe. For 
 two hundred years she resisted her first foreign invaders, 
 the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have ab- 
 sorbed into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately 
 retained a footing on her eastern shores. 
 
 With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the 
 twelfth century the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the 
 first time the Irish Channel assumes its tragic significance. 
 England, compounded of Britons, Teutons, Danes, Scandin- 
 avians, Normans, with the indelible impress of Rome upon the 
 whole, had emerged, under Nature's mysterious alchemy, a 
 strong State. Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her 
 tribal organization, her national culture, but at the cost of 
 falling behind in the march of political and military organiza- 
 tion. Sixty miles divided her from the nearest part of the 
 outlying dominions of feudal England, 150 miles from the 
 dynamic centre of English power. The degree of distance 
 seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in corre- 
 spondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two 
 countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst 
 possible effects on both. The process was slow. Ireland 
 was near enough to attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers 
 and colonists, but strong enough and fair enough for three 
 hundred years to transform them into patriots " more Irish 
 than the Irish " ; always, however, too near and too weak, 
 even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of 
 English rule from the foothold they had obtained on her 
 shores, while at the same time too far and too formidable to 
 enable that rule to expand into the complete conquest and 
 subjugation of the realm. 
 
 " The English rule," says Mr. Lecky, " as a living reality, 
 was confined and concentrated within the limits of the Pale. 
 The hostile power planted in the heart of the nation destroyed 
 all possibility of central government, while it was itself in- 
 capable of fulfilling that function. Like a spear-point embedded 
 in a living body, it inflamed all around it and deranged every
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 7 
 
 vital function. It prevented the gradual reduction of the 
 island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have 
 taken place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead 
 of that peaceful and almost silent amalgamation of races, 
 customs, laws, and languages, which took place in England, 
 and which is the source of many of the best elements in English 
 life and character, the two nations remained in Ireland for 
 centuries in hostility." 
 
 From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt 
 by the English for the Irish race which has darkened all 
 subsequent history. It was not originally a temperamental 
 antipathy, or it would be impossible to explain the powerful 
 attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws for the great 
 bulk of the Anglo - Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland, 
 even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy 
 between a Protestant race and a race exclusively and im- 
 movably Catholic. It was in origin a political antipathy 
 between a small official minority, backed by the support of 
 a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy over a 
 large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal 
 feuds, but on the whole united in loathing and combating 
 that ascendancy. Universal experience, as I shall after- 
 wards show, proves that an enmity so engendered takes a 
 more monstrous and degrading shape than any other. Re- 
 ligion becomes its pretext. Ignorance makes it easy, and 
 interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as 
 savages outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any 
 violence and treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and 
 becomes a permanent political axiom, distorting and abasing 
 the character of those who act on it and those who, suffering 
 from it, and retaliating against its consequences, construct 
 their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness of the 
 dominant race. If left to themselves, white races, of diverse 
 nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually 
 coalesce, or at least learn to live together peaceably. But if 
 an external power too remote to feel genuine responsibility 
 for the welfare of the inhabitants, while near enough to exert 
 its military power on them, takes sides in favour of the minority, 
 and employs them as its permanent and privileged garrison, 
 the results are fatal to the peace and prosperity of the country
 
 8 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly harmful, though in a 
 degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was with Ireland ; 
 and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history what an 
 extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any 
 transient phase of wise and tolerant government. 
 
 Such a phase occurred hi the latter part of the reign of 
 Henry VIII., when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for 
 the first time some semblance of royal authority was estab- 
 lished over the whole realm ; and when an effort was also made, 
 not through theft or violence, but by conciliatory statecraft, 
 to replace the native Brehon system of law and land tenure 
 by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs. 
 The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession 
 of Mary, to be replaced by the forcible confiscation of 
 Irish land, and the " planting " of English and Scotch 
 settlers. 
 
 Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, 
 is now drawn into the mighty stream of British colonial ex- 
 pansion. Adventurous and ambitious Englishmen began to 
 regard her fertile acres as Raleigh regarded America, and, in 
 point of time, the systematic and State-aided colonization of 
 Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of 
 America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth 
 century no permanent British settlement had been made hi 
 America, while in Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's 
 Counties was begun as early as 1556, and under Elizabeth 
 further vast confiscations were carried out in Munster within 
 the same century. But from the reign of James I. onward, 
 the two processes advance pari passu. Virginia, first founded 
 by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the 
 confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots ; 
 and in 1 620, just after that huge measure of expropriation, the 
 Pilgrim Fathers landed in New Plymouth. Puritan Massa- 
 chusetts with its offshoots, Connecticut, New Haven and 
 Rhode Island as well as Catholic Maryland, were formally 
 established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a 
 period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic 
 religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the 
 unhappy Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, 
 with its fierce excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 9 
 
 Ireland, the united Colonies of New England banded them- 
 selves together for mutual defence. 
 
 A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and 
 rapine, at the extermination of the Irish race, with the savage 
 watchword "To Hell or Connaught," planted Ulster, Munster, 
 and Lemster with men of the same stock, stamp, and ideas 
 as the colonists of New England, and hi the first years of the 
 Restoration Charles II. confirmed these confiscations, at the 
 same time that he granted Carolina to Lord Clarendon, New 
 Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey to Lord 
 Berkeley, and issued fresh Charters for Connecticut and Mary- 
 land. Finally, Quaker Perm founded Pennsylvania in 1682, 
 and in 1691 William III., after the hopeless Jacobite insurrec- 
 tions in favour of the last of the Stuarts, wrung the last million 
 acres of good Irish land from the old Catholic proprietors, 
 planted them with Protestant Englishmen, and completed the 
 colonization of Ireland. Forty years passed (1733) before 
 Georgia, the last of the " Old Thirteen Colonies," was 
 planted, as Ulster had been planted, mainly by Scotch 
 Presbyterians. 
 
 During the greater part of this period we must remember 
 that conquered Ireland herself was contributing to the coloniza- 
 tion of America. Every successive act of spoliation drove 
 Catholic Irishmen across the Atlantic as well as into Europe, 
 and gave every Colony an infusion of Irish blood. Until the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century this class of emigration 
 was for the most part involuntary. Cromwell, for example, 
 shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West 
 Indies and America for sale, as " servants " to the colonists. 
 The only organized and voluntary expedition in which Irish 
 Catholics took part was that to Maryland under Lord Balti- 
 more. The distinction in course of time became immaterial. 
 In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became 
 one people, with a common political and social tradition. 
 
 It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish 
 question, indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics 
 and progress of the American and Irish settlements, and in 
 doing so to observe the profound effects of geographical 
 position and political institutions on human character. I 
 shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the comparison
 
 10 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa 
 by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement. 
 
 Let us note, first, that both in America and Ireland the 
 Colonies were bi-racial, with this all-important distinction, 
 that in America the native race was coloured, savage, heathen, 
 nomadic, incapable of fusion with the whites, and, in relation 
 to the almost illimitable territory colonized, not numerous ; 
 while in Ireland the native race was white, civilized, Christian, 
 numerous, and confined within the limits of a small island to 
 which it was passionately attached by treasured national 
 traditions, and whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and 
 revered system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this 
 respect, is slight, and becomes insignificant, except in regard to 
 the similarity of the mental attitude of the colonists towards 
 Indians and Irish respectively. In natural humanity the 
 colonists of Ireland and the colonists of America differed in no 
 appreciable degree. They were the same men, with the same 
 inherent virtues and defects, acting according to the pressure 
 of environment. Danger, in proportionate degree, made both 
 classes brutal and perfidious ; but in America, though there were 
 moments of sharp crisis, as in 1675 on the borders of Massa- 
 chusetts, the degree was comparatively small, and through the 
 defeat and extrusion of the Indians diminished steadily. In 
 Ireland, because complete expulsion and extermination were 
 impossible, the degree was originally great, and, long after it 
 had actually disappeared, haunted the imagination and dis- 
 torted the policy of the invading nation. 
 
 In America there was no land question. Freeholds were 
 plentiful for the meanest settlers and the title was sound and 
 indisputable. In the " proprietary " Colonies, it is true, vast 
 tracts of country were originally vested by royal grants in 
 a single nobleman or a group of capitalists, just as vast estates 
 were granted in Ireland to peers, London companies, and 
 syndicates of "undertakers"; but by the nature of things, 
 the extent of territory, its distance, and the absence of a 
 white subject race, no agrarian harm resulted in America, and 
 a healthy system of tenure, almost exclusively freehold, was 
 naturally evolved. 
 
 In Ireland the land question was the whole question from the 
 first. If the natives had been exterminated, or their remnants
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 11 
 
 wholly confined, as Cromwell planned, to the barren lands 
 of Connaught, all might have been well for the conquerors. 
 Or if Ireland had been, in Mr. Chamberlain's phrase, a thousand 
 miles away, all might have come right under the compulsion 
 of circumstances and the healing influence of time. That the 
 Celtic race still possessed its strong powers of assimilation was 
 shown by the almost complete denationalization and absorp- 
 tion of a large number of Cromwell's soldier-colonists in the 
 south and south-east under what Mr. Lecky calls the " in- 
 vincible Catholicism " of the Irish women. But the Irish 
 were not only numerous, but fatally near the seat of Empire. 
 The natives Irish or Anglo-Irish were still more than twice 
 as numerous as the colonists ; they were scattered over the 
 whole country, barren or fertile, and that country was within 
 a day's sail of England. The titles of the colonists to the land 
 rested on sheer violence, sometimes aggravated by the grossest 
 meanness and treachery, and these titles were not recognized 
 by the plundered race. Even with their gradual recognition 
 it would have been difficult to introduce the English system 
 of tenure, which was radically different and repellent to the 
 Irish mind. The bare idea of one man absolutely owning land 
 and transmitting it entire to his heirs was incomprehensible 
 to them. 
 
 The solution for all these difficulties was unfortunately only 
 too easy and obvious. England was near, strong, and 
 thoroughly imbued with the policy of governing Ireland on the 
 principle of antagonizing the races within her. It was possible, 
 therefore, by English help, under laws made in England, to 
 constitute the Irish outlaws from the land, labourers on it, 
 no doubt, that was an economic necessity, precarious occupiers 
 of plots just sufficient to support life ; but, in the eyes of the 
 law, serfs. The planters of the southern American Colonies im- 
 ported African negroes for the same purpose, with irretrievably 
 mischievous results to their own descendants. Nor is it an ex- 
 aggeration to compare the use made of the Irish for a certain 
 period to the use made of these negroes, for great numbers 
 of the Irish were actually exported as slaves to Barbadoes, 
 Jamaica, and even to Carolina. 
 
 The outlawed multitude in Ireland were deprived, not only 
 of all rights to the land, but, as a corollary, of all social
 
 12 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 privileges whatsoever. " The law," said an Irish Lord Chan- 
 cellor, " does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish 
 Roman Catholic." The instrument of ostracism was the famous 
 Penal Code, begun in William's reign in direct and immediate 
 defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick, 
 guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and per- 
 fected in the reign of Anne. This Code, ostensibly framed to 
 extirpate Catholicism, was primarily designed to confirm and 
 perpetuate the gigantic dislocation of property caused by the 
 transference of Irish and Anglo-Irish land into English and 
 Scotch ownership. Since the rightful owners were Catholic, 
 and the wrongful owners Protestants, the laws against the 
 Catholic religion a religion feared everywhere by Englishmen 
 at this period were the simplest means of legalizing and 
 buttressing the new regime. I shall not linger over the details 
 of the Code. Burke 's description of it remains classic and un- 
 questioned : "A complete system full of coherence and con- 
 sistency, well digested and composed in all its parts ... a 
 machine of wise and elaborate contrivance ; and as well 
 fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation 
 of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature 
 itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of 
 man." 
 
 The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, 
 and impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws 
 against priests, worship, education, and of the bars to commerce 
 and the professions, I need not speak. In the matter of 
 property, the fundamental enactments concerned the land, 
 namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it for more 
 than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made 
 profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created 
 and sustained the serfdom I have described, and is the direct 
 cause of the modern land problem. It remained unaltered in 
 the smallest respect for seventy years, that is, until 1761, 
 when a Catholic was permitted to lease for sixty-one years 
 as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet deep. 
 Long before this the distribution of landed property and the 
 system of land tenure had become stereotyped. 
 
 This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed 
 on the face of the globe. It has been matched in portions of
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 13 
 
 India, but nowhere else in this Empire save in little Prince 
 Edward Island, where we shall meet with it again. In Ireland, 
 where it assumed its worst form, violent conquest by a neigh- 
 bouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the old 
 owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional 
 English tenures, even into the relations between the British 
 superior landlord and the British occupying colonist. The 
 bulk of the confiscated Irish land, as I have mentioned, 
 had been granted in fee to English noblemen, gentlemen, or 
 speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class tenants. 
 A number of Cromwell's private soldiers settled in Leinster 
 and Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an excep- 
 tion to this rule. But the greater part of Ireland, in owner- 
 ship, as distinguished from occupation, consisted of big estates, 
 and a large number of the English owners, being only a day's 
 sail from England, became, by natural instinct, habitual 
 absentees. Others lived in Dublin and neglected their estates. 
 Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland 
 the proportions of an enormous economic evil. In England 
 the landlord was, and remains, a capitalist, providing a 
 house and a fully equipped farm to the tenant. In Ireland 
 he was a rent receiver pure and simple, unconnected with 
 the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic. The 
 rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who 
 contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and 
 had to extract that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the 
 occupiers, whether Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, 
 and usually did so by subdivision of holdings and dispro- 
 portionate elevation of rents. Over three of the four Provinces 
 of Ireland for a small part of Ulster was differently situated 
 the middleman himself frequently became an absentee and 
 farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further 
 subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, 
 and who, in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until 
 the land in many cases was " subset six deep."* The ultimate 
 occupier and sole creator of agricultural wealth lived perpetu- 
 ally on the verge of starvation, beggared not only by extor- 
 tionate rents, partly worked out in virtually forced labour, 
 but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican Church, 
 * J. Fisher, " End of the Irish Parliament " cited.
 
 14 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the 
 hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident 
 upper class though we must allow for many honourable 
 exceptions was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young 
 as petty despots with the vices of despots ; idle, tyrannical, 
 profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the 
 modern civilized world has ever known. The slave-owning 
 planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, 
 which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over 
 human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the 
 dominant and subject race was too broad and deep to permit 
 of substantial deterioration in the former. In Ireland the 
 ethnological difference was small ; the artificial cleavage and 
 deterioration great in inverse proportion. 
 
 For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, 
 tenancies of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, 
 by lease or at will, were alike in certain fundamental character- 
 istics. The tenant had neither security of tenure nor right 
 to the value of the improvements which were invariably made 
 by his own capital and labour. Even a leaseholder, when his 
 lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to renewal, but must 
 take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the farm going 
 to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and 
 penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into 
 other hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, 
 in a similar case, though relatively his hardship was less, 
 since his condition, being the lowest possible in all circum- 
 stances, could scarcely be worse. Obviously, in a case where 
 the landlord was neither the capitalist nor the protector and 
 friend of the tenant, the possession of those elementary rights, 
 security of tenure and compensation for improvements, was 
 the condition precedent to the growth of a sound agrarian 
 system. Their denial was incompatible with social order. 
 Yet they were denied, and for one hundred and eighty years 
 an intermittent struggle to obtain them by violence and 
 criminal conspiracy degraded and retarded Ireland. 
 
 But a marked distinction grew up between a small portion 
 of Ireland and the rest. James I.'s plantation of Ulster had 
 been far more drastic and thorough than any operation of the 
 kind before or since. Later immigrants had flowed in, and
 
 COLONIZATION OF IKELAND AND AMERICA 15 
 
 at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the north-eastern 
 portion the predominantly Protestant Ulster of to-day 
 Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were thickly 
 settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and 
 tenacious temper. In the original leases granted by the con- 
 cessionaires in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was 
 implied, and a nominal rent levied, somewhat after the 
 American model ; but under the example of other Provinces, 
 and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the 
 Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been 
 almost wholly obliterated. The absentee landlords, reckless of 
 social welfare, exacted the rack or competitive rent. As in 
 the south and west, tithes to the Established Church and 
 oppressive and corrupt local taxation for roads and other 
 purposes, aggravated the discontent. For agrarian reasons 
 only and there were others which I shall mention many 
 thousands of Protestants left Ireland for ever. It required a 
 long period of outrage and conspiracy, attaining in 1770 the 
 proportions of a small civil war, and at the end of the 
 century, by the anti-Catholic passions it inspired, wrecking 
 new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to be known 
 as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right. If Protestant freemen 
 had to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and 
 then only after irreparable damage to Ireland, the first con- 
 dition of social stability, a tolerable land system, the effect 
 of the agrarian system on Catholic Ireland, prostrate under the 
 Penal Code, may be easily imagined. 
 
 In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and ex- 
 cessive tithes, rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, 
 unknown in the vast and thinly populated tracts of America 
 intensified the misery of the Irish peasantry of the eighteenth 
 century. This was the conversion of the best land from 
 tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and 
 migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. 
 Lecky quotes a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the 
 " best arable land in the kingdom in immense tracts wantonly 
 enjoyed by the cattle of a few individuals, and at the same 
 time the junctions of our highways and streets crowded with 
 shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change from 
 arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run
 
 16 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 a healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England 
 and Scotland included, though temporarily a fruitful source 
 of misery. Under normal conditions the immediate evils 
 right themselves in course of time. Nothing was normal in 
 Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the outside 
 world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which 
 produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the 
 wealth of the kingdom. Under an accumulation of hardships 
 famine was periodic, and from 1760, when the first Whiteboys 
 appeared, disorder hi one degree or another was chronic. The 
 motive, it is universally agreed now, was material, not religious. 
 The Whiteboys of the south and west were the counterparts 
 of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and 
 even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as 
 Catholic Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish 
 statesman, denying this now well-ascertained fact, was never- 
 theless explicit enough about the cause of the disorders. " The 
 real causes," he said, " were . . . exorbitant rents, low wages, 
 want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by their 
 rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land- 
 jobbers, by whom small portions of them were again let and 
 relet to intermediate oppressors, and by them subdivided for 
 five times their value among the wretched starvers upon 
 potatoes and water ; taxes yearly increasing, and still more 
 tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit, 
 unwillingly pays in addition to his priest's money . . . misery, 
 oppression, and famine."* 
 
 Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of 
 secret societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth 
 century ; Terry Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moon- 
 lighters, in the nineteenth, was rampant for nearly two 
 centuries, long surviving the repeal of the Penal Code ; and 
 its last echoes may be heard at this moment. In the absence 
 of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means 
 of self-defence. The remedy applied was retaliatory violence 
 under forms of law. Nothing whatsoever was done to remove 
 the essential vices of agrarian tenure during the eighteenth 
 century ; nothing tentative even during the nineteenth century 
 until the year 1870 ; nothing effective and permanent until 
 * MS. Autobiography cited by Lecky, vol. ii., p. 35.
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 17 
 
 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought to give 
 direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the 
 addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent. Englishmen 
 should realize this when they discuss Irish character. It is a 
 very old story, but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking 
 vaguely of Irish discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, 
 \'-*or have never learnt, this and other fundamental facts. As 
 for the Irish landlords, we must remember that the founders 
 of that class differed in no respect from other English landlords, 
 or from the aristocratic American concessionaires, just as their 
 compatriot tenants and lessees were identical in stock with the 
 American colonists. Their descendants and successors have 
 been the victims of circumstance. Each generation has inherited 
 the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human nature 
 to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which 
 created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them. Doubly 
 victimized have been those resident landlords who at all 
 periods, from the earliest era of colonization, in spite of tempta- 
 tion and bad examples around them, have acted towards their 
 tenantry as humane and patriotic citizens. A bad agrarian 
 system infects the whole body politic. Good landlords and 
 contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest. 
 
 In commerce and industry, as in land, the Irish Colony 
 stood at a heavy disadvantage by comparison with America. 
 From the Restoration onward, English statesmen took the 
 same view of both dependencies, namely, that their com- 
 mercial interests should be wholly subordinate to those of 
 the Mother Country, and the same Department, the Board 
 of Trade and Plantations, made the fiscal regulations for 
 Ireland and America. The old idea that for trade purposes 
 Ireland counted as an integral part of the United Kingdom did 
 not last longer than 1663. But it was not wholly abrogated 
 by the great Navigation Act of that year, which, though it 
 placed harsh restrictions on the Irish cattle trade with England, 
 did not expressly exclude Irish ships from the monopoly of 
 the colonial trade conferred upon English vessels, so that for 
 seven years longer a tolerably prosperous business was carried 
 on direct between Ireland and the American Colonies.* An 
 
 * The best modern account of the commercial relations of Great Britain 
 and Ireland is Miss Murray's " Commercial Relations between England and 
 Ireland." 
 
 2
 
 18 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Act of 1670, prohibiting, with a few negligible exceptions, all 
 direct imports from the Colonies into Ireland, gave a heavy 
 check to this business, arrested the growth of Irish shipping, 
 and, in conjunction with subsequent measures of navigational, 
 fiscal, and industrial repression, converted Ireland for a century 
 into a kind of trade helot. She was treated either as a foreign 
 country, as a Colony, or as something inferior to either, accord- 
 ing to the dictation of English interests, while possessing neither 
 the commercial independence of a foreign country nor the 
 natural and indefeasible immunity which distance, climate, 
 variety of soil, and unlimited room for expansion continued to 
 confer, in spite of all coercive restraints, upon the American 
 Colonies. Though the British trade monopoly was certainly 
 a contributory cause in promoting the American revolution, 
 it was never, any more than the British claim to tax, a severe 
 practical grievance. The prohibition of the export of manu- 
 factures, and the compulsory reciprocal exchange of colonial 
 natural products for British manufactured goods and the 
 chartered merchandise of the Orient, were not very onerous 
 restrictions for young communities settled in virgin soil ; nor, 
 with a few exceptions like raw wool, whose export was for- 
 bidden, were the American natural products of a kind which 
 could compete with those of the Mother Country. The real 
 damage inflicted upon the Colonies by the mercantile system 
 one which its modern defenders are apt to forget was moral. 
 To practise and condone smuggling was habitual in America, 
 and some of the English Governors set the worst example of 
 all by making a profit out of connivance at the illicit traffic. 
 " Graft " was their creation. The moral mischief done was 
 permanent, and it resembled in a lesser degree the mischief 
 done in Ireland both by bad agrarian and bad commercial laws. 
 Ireland, owing to her proximity, was in the unhappy position 
 of being a competitor in the great staples of trade, both raw 
 and manufactured, and she was near enough and weak enough 
 to render it easy to stamp out this competition so far as it was 
 thought to be inimical to English interests. The cattle and 
 provision trade with England had been damaged as far back 
 as 1663, and was killed in 1666, though the export of provisions 
 to foreign countries survived, and became almost the sole source 
 of Irish trade during the eighteenth century. The policy with
 
 COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 19 
 
 raw wool was to admit just as much as would satisfy the 
 English weavers without arousing the determined opposition 
 of the competitive English graziers. The Irish manufactured 
 wool trade, a flourishing business, for which Irishmen showed 
 exceptionaUy high aptitude, and which in the normal course 
 of things would probably have become her staple industry, 
 was destroyed altogether, avowedly in the interests of the 
 English staple industry, by prohibitory export duties imposed 
 in 1698. Subsidiary industries cotton, glass, brewing, sugar- 
 refining, sail-cloth, hempen rope, and salt were successively 
 strangled. One manufacture alone, that of linen, centred in 
 the Protestant North, was spared, and for a short period was 
 even encouraged, not because it was a Protestant industry, but 
 because at first it aroused no trade jealousy in England, and 
 was in some respects serviceable to her. In 1708, when it 
 was proposed to extend the industry to Leinster, considerations 
 of foreign trade provoked an outburst of hostility, and harassing 
 restrictions were imposed on this industry also. On the whole, 
 however, it suffered less than the rest, and lived to become 
 one of the two important manufacturing industries of present- 
 day Ireland. 
 
 English policy was as fatuous as it was cruel. Numbers of 
 the Irish manufacturers and artisans, both Catholic and 
 Protestant, emigrated to Europe, and devoted their skill and 
 energy to strengthening industries which competed with those 
 of England. Within Ireland, since industry and commerce 
 formed the one outlet left by the Penal Code for Catholic 
 brains and capital though even here the Code imposed 
 harassing disabilities the commercial restrictions completed 
 the ruin of the proscribed sect. But at this period the main 
 source of weakness to Ireland, of strength to America, and of 
 danger to the Empire as a whole, was the Protestant emigration. 
 Lecky estimates that 12,000 Protestant families in Dublin 
 and 30,000 in the rest of the country were ruined by the sup- 
 pression of the wool trade. The great majority of these 
 Protestants were Presbyterians belonging to North-East 
 Ulster, and descendants of the men who had defended that 
 Province with such desperate gallantry against the Irish 
 insurgents under the deposed James II. Political power in 
 Ireland was wielded in the interests of a small territorial and
 
 20 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Episcopalian aristocracy, largely absentee. The Dissenters 
 belonged to the middle and lower classes, and were for the most 
 part tenants or artisans. Creed and caste antipathies were 
 combined against them. Their value as citizens was ignored. 
 Though their right to worship was legally recognized by an 
 Act of 1719, they remained from 1704 to 1778 subject to the 
 Test, were incapacitated for all public employment, and were 
 forbidden to open schools. Under an accumulation of agrarian, 
 economic, and religious disabilities, they naturally left Ireland 
 to find freedom in America. And it is beyond question that 
 they turned the scale against the British arms in the great 
 War of Independence.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 
 
 IN the Old World and in the New, therefore, two societies, 
 composed of human beings similar in all essential respects, 
 were growing up under the protection of the British Crown ; 
 the one servile, the other free ; the one stagnant where it was 
 not retrograde, the other prosperous, progressive, and, by the 
 magnetism of its own freedom, progress, and prosperity, steadily 
 draining its Irish fellow of talent, energy, and industrial skill. 
 
 What was the ultimate cause of this glaring divergency ? 
 Religion, as a spiritual force, was not the root cause. The 
 American Colonies, with three exceptions the earliest Virginia, 
 the latest Georgia, and the Catholic community of Maryland 
 were formed by Dissenters,* exiles themselves from persecution, 
 but not necessarily forbearing to others, and, in the case of 
 the New England Puritans, bitterly intolerant. It is interest- 
 ing to observe that the Quakers and the Catholics, men standing 
 at the opposite poles of theology, set the highest example of 
 tolerance. Quaker Pennsylvania enforced absolute liberty 
 of conscience, and Quakers in all the Provinces worked for 
 religious harmony and freedom. Catholic Maryland, as long 
 as its government remained in Catholic hands, and under the 
 guidance of the wise and liberal Proprietary, Lord Baltimore, 
 pursued the same policy, and attracted members of sects 
 persecuted in New England. f The parallel with Ireland is signifi- 
 
 * The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable. Nearly all historians 
 have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees ; but Mr. S. B. Weeks, a 
 Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that this was not the case 
 (" Religious Development in the Province of North Carolina," Baltimore, 1892). 
 The Charter contained a clause for liberty of conscience on the instructive 
 ground that, " by reason of the remote distance of those places, toleration 
 would be no breach of the unity and conformity established in this realm." 
 
 f " Church and State in Maryland," George Petrie. Lord Baltimore, the 
 Catholic founder and Proprietary, enforced complete tolerance from the first 
 
 21
 
 22 
 
 cant. At the end of the seventeenth century, when a quarrel 
 was raging between the Crown and Massachusetts over the 
 persecution of Quakers in that Colony, and for a further period 
 in the eighteenth century, Quaker missionaries and settlers 
 were conducting a campaign of revivalism in Ireland with no 
 molestation from the Catholics, though with intermittent 
 obstruction from magistrates and Protestant clergy. Wesleyans 
 received the same sympathetic treatment.* The tolerance 
 shown by Irish Catholics, in spite of terrible provocation, is 
 acknowledged by all reputable historians. Nor was Protestant 
 intolerance, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, of a deeper 
 dogmatic shade than anywhere else in the King's dominions. 
 But in Ireland it was political, economic, and social, while in 
 America it was purely theological, and, moreover, purely 
 American. The Episcopalian ascendancy in Ireland repre- 
 sented foreign interests, and therefore struck against Dissent 
 as well as against Popery, and estranged both. The root of the 
 American trouble, leading to the separation of the Colonies, 
 was political and wholly unconnected with religion. The root 
 of the Irish trouble, adventitiously connected with religion, 
 lay, and lies still, in the Irish political system. Other evils 
 were transient and curable ; this was permanent. The Penal 
 Code was eventually relaxed ; the disabilities of the Dissenters 
 were eventually removed ; the commercial servitude was 
 abolished, but the political system in essentials has never been 
 changed. Let us see what it was and how it worked at the 
 period we are considering, again by comparison with America. 
 Though the word " plantation " was applied alike to the 
 colonization of Ireland and America, Ireland was never called 
 a Colony, but a Kingdom. The distinction was not scientific, 
 and operated, like all other distinctions, to the injury of 
 Ireland. Neither country was represented in the British 
 Parliament. In both countries the representatives of the 
 Crown were appointed by England, and controlled, in America 
 almost completely, in Ireland absolutely, the Executive and 
 
 (1634), and secured the passage of an Act in 1649 giving legal force to the 
 policy, with heavy penalties against interference with any sect. In 1654 
 Puritans gained control of the Assembly, and passed an Act against Popery. 
 A counter-revolution repealed this Act, but finally in 1689 the Church of 
 England was established by law. 
 
 * Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. L, pp. 408-410.
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 23 
 
 Judges. In Ireland the Viceroy was always an Englishman ; in 
 America, the Governors of a few of the non-proprietary Colonies 
 were colonials, but most Governors were English, and some of 
 the proprietary class were absentees.* In the case both of 
 Ireland and America the English Government claimed a 
 superior right of control over legislation and taxation, and in 
 both cases it was found necessary to remove all doubts as to 
 this right by passing Declaratory Acts, for Ireland in 1719, 
 for America in 1766. The great difference lay in the Legis- 
 lature, and was the result of different degrees of remoteness 
 from the seat of power. America was profoundly democratic 
 from the beginning, outpacing the Mother Country by fully 
 two centuries. There was no aristocracy, and in most Colonies 
 little distinction between upper and middle classes. The popular 
 Assemblies, elected on the broadest possible franchise, were 
 truly representative. Some of the Legislative Councils, or 
 Upper Chambers, were elective also. Most of them, although 
 nominated, and therefore inclined to be hostile to the popular 
 body, were nevertheless of identical social composition ; so that 
 there was often an official, but never a caste, ascendancy. From 
 very early times there was occasional friction between the 
 Home Government, represented by the Governors, and the 
 colonial democracies, over such matters as taxation, official 
 salaries, quartering of troops, and navigation laws. Writs of 
 quo warranto were issued against Connecticut, Carolina, New 
 York, and Maryland, in the latter part of the seventeenth 
 century, and the Charter of Massachusetts, after long wrangles 
 with the Crown, was forfeited in 1684, and not restored until 
 1692, after a period of despotic government under Sir Edmund 
 Andros. But for a century or more the system worked well 
 enough upon the whole. Under the powerful lever of the 
 representative Assembly, neutralized by the ever-present need 
 for military protection from the Mother Country, and with the 
 wholesome check to undue coercion set by the broad Atlantic, 
 
 * Until 1692 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, elected their 
 own Governors. Massachusetts continued to have Colonial Governors, and 
 sometimes New Jersey and New Hampshire. Proprietary Governments were 
 gradually abolished and converted into "Royal " Governments like the rest. 
 At the period of the Declaration of Independence two only were left 
 Pennsylvania and Maryland (see "Origin and Growth of the English 
 Colonies," H. E. Egerton).
 
 24 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 civic freedom grew and flourished to a degree unknown in any 
 other part of the civilized world. 
 
 In Ireland civic freedom was unknown. There was no 
 popular Assembly. A wealthy aristocracy of English extrac- 
 tion and of Anglican faith, partly resident, partly absentee, 
 and wholly subservient to the English Government, constituted 
 the Upper House of that strange institution known as Parlia- 
 ment, and to a great extent nominated and controlled the 
 Lower House through means frankly corrupt. Representation 
 was almost nominal ; close pocket-boroughs predominated, and 
 seats were bought and sold in the open market. In the year 
 1790 more than a third of the Members of the House of Com- 
 mons were placemen, 216 Members out of 300 were elected by 
 boroughs and manors, and, of these, 176 were elected by indi- 
 vidual patrons. Fifty-three of these patrons, nominating 123 
 Members, sat as Peers in the Upper House. Cash, places, and 
 peerages, were the usual considerations paid for maintaining a 
 Government majority. The Catholics, from three-quarters to 
 five-sixths of the population, had neither votes nor members ; 
 the Dissenters scarcely any members and an almost powerless 
 vote. The Irish Legislature, by an Act as old as 1495, the 
 famous Poynings' Law, could neither initiate nor pass a measure 
 without the consent of the English Privy Council, and the 
 Declaratory Act of 1719 confirmed the power of making 
 English Acts applicable to Ireland. Government in England 
 itself was, no doubt, unrepresentative and corrupt at that 
 period, and the people paid the penalty in full ; but it was a 
 national government, under the aegis of the national faith, and 
 resting, however remotely, on the ultimate sanction of the 
 people, just as American opinion, more democratically ascer- 
 tained, continued to control the major part of American affairs. 
 In Ireland the Government was systematically anti-Irish. 
 There was no career for Irishmen in Ireland. Both Catholics 
 and Dissenters were excluded from all civil and military 
 offices ; the highest posts were generally given to Englishmen 
 born and bred, and the country, Episcopalian only to a frac- 
 tional extent, was ruled by a narrow Episcopalian oligarchy of 
 wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered Irish freedom 
 for the place and power of their own families and dependents. 
 The conditions of this sordid exchange were the ground of the
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 25 
 
 first important Anglo-Irish political struggle in the eighteenth 
 century, when the English Viceroy, Townshend, succeeded in 
 1770-71, at the cost of half a million, in transferring the bribing 
 power, and therefore the controlling power, from the " Under- 
 takers," as they were known, direct to the Crown. 
 
 There seems to have been no continuous English policy 
 beyond that of making Ireland completely subservient to 
 English interests and purposes, and often to purposes of the 
 most humiliating and degrading kind. The Irish Pension List 
 has earned immortal infamy. Jobs too scandalous to pass 
 muster hi England were systematically foisted upon the Irish 
 establishment. Royal mistresses, a host of needy Germans, a 
 Danish Queen banished for adultery, lived in England or 
 abroad upon incomes drawn from the impoverished Irish 
 Exchequer. Nor was it only a question of pensions. Quan- 
 tities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given to 
 Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland. In 
 short, the English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spam's 
 policy towards her South American Colonies, minus the grosser 
 forms of physical cruelty and oppression. Yet Ireland, like 
 the American Colonies until the verge of the revolutionary 
 struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in peace 
 and war. The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken, 
 inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, 
 does not, from the human standpoint, appear worthy of ad- 
 miration, but it was a fact. The few Catholic noblemen out- 
 did the Protestants in expressions of devotion ; the Whiteboy 
 risings were as little disloyal as religious. Not a hand stirred 
 for James or his heirs when Jacobite plots and risings were 
 causing grave public danger in England and Scotland. Catholic 
 Lord Trimleston offered exclusively Catholic regiments with 
 Catholic officers to George III. for foreign service in 1762, 
 though they were vetoed by what his Viceroy Halifax called 
 the " ill-bred bigotry " of the Irish Parliament. Nor was it 
 till thirty years after that date that Protestant discontent, 
 under intolerable provocation, assumed an anti-dynastic and 
 Republican form. To compare the Imperial spirit displayed 
 by America and Ireland in their views and action is difficult, 
 partly because the various American Colonies differed widely, 
 partly because there existed in Ireland no organ of government
 
 26 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 which could express popular feeling. Neither country, of 
 course, paid any cash contribution to Imperial expenses, 
 though both could fairly claim that the English monopoly of 
 trade imposed an indirect tribute of indefinite size, while 
 Ireland, in pensions, rents to absentees, and sinecure appoint- 
 ments, was drained of many millions more. American 
 patronage was an element of substantial value to England, 
 but it was not on the Irish scale. America on the whole, 
 perhaps, showed less patriotic feeling than Ireland. With full 
 allowance for the lack of sympathy and understanding shown 
 by the British regulars to the American volunteers in their 
 co-operation in the French wars, it can scarcely be denied that 
 the colonists, together with much heroism and public spirit, 
 showed occasional slackness and parsimony in resisting the 
 penetration of a foreign Power which threatened to hem in 
 their settlements from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the 
 Mississippi. Ireland during the Seven Years' War, and until 
 the Peace of Paris in 1763, maintained a war establishment of 
 24,000 troops. She maintained a peace establishment of 
 12,000 troops, and from 1767 onwards of 15,000 troops. There 
 never seems to have been a whisper of protest from the Catholic 
 population against these measures, nor, except in the matter of 
 the American War, to which we shall come presently, from the 
 Protestants. It may be added that, after 1767, Catholics in 
 considerable numbers were surreptitiously enlisted in the ranks, 
 in spite of the Penal Code, and from then until the present day 
 have fought for the Flag as staunchly as any other class of the 
 King's subjects. 
 
 It never occurred to responsible English statesmen that here 
 was ground, firm as a rock in America, and firm enough in 
 Ireland, on which, if only they obeyed the instincts and 
 maxims upon which England herself had risen to greatness, 
 they might build a mighty and durable Imperial structure. 
 That loyalty, to be genuine and lasting, must spring from 
 liberty was a truth they did not appreciate, and to this truth, 
 strangely enough, in spite of the lessons of nearly a century and 
 a half, a numerous school of English statesmen is still blind. 
 It was no doubt a fatality that the smouldering discontent 
 both of America and Ireland burst into flame in the reign of 
 a monarch who endeavoured, even within the limits of Britain,
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 27 
 
 to regain the arbitrary power which had cost their throne to 
 the Stuarts ; it was an additional fatality that the standard of 
 public morals among the class through which he ruled during 
 the period of crisis had fallen to lower depths than ever before 
 or since. Even incorruptible men were either weak and selfish 
 or subject to some cardinal defect of temper or intellect which, 
 at times of crisis, neutralized their genius. Chatham and 
 Burke were the noblest figures of the time, yet Chatham, in 
 his highest mood a nobler and truer champion of American 
 liberty than Burke, was Minister nominally, at any rate 
 when the Revenue Duties imposed upon the American Colonies 
 in 1867 destroyed in a moment the reconciliation brought 
 about by the repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke was surely 
 false to his political philosophy in founding his American argu- 
 ment on expedience rather than on principle. Chatham was 
 a thorough democrat, trusting the people, poor or rich, rude 
 or cultured, common or noble, American or British. Burke, 
 at a time when the reflection of the genuine opinion of the 
 nation in a pure and free Parliament might have saved us, as 
 his splendid orations could not save us, from a disastrous war, 
 scouted Parliamentary reform, and took his unconscious share 
 in playing the game of the most narrow coercionist Tories like 
 Charles Townshend and George III. 
 
 Of the interminable chain of fatalities which sicken the mind 
 in following every phase of Ireland's history, Burke's rigid 
 temperamental conservatism always seems to me the most 
 fatal and the most melancholy. It is not that he, the greatest 
 intellect Ireland has ever produced, made his career in Eng- 
 land. By the time one reaches the period in which he lived 
 one gets used to the expatriation of Irish brains and vigour, 
 not only to England and America, but to Spain, France, 
 Russia, and Germany. It is that his intellect was so con- 
 stituted as in the long run to be useless, and on some occasions 
 absolutely harmful, to Ireland, sincerely as he loved her, and 
 often as he supported measures for her temporary benefit, and 
 rejoiced in their temporary success. An incident occurred in 
 1773 which tested his worth to Ireland, and incidentally threw 
 into strong light English views of Ireland and America at the 
 period immediately preceding the revolutionary epoch. The 
 Irish Government, not with any high social aim, but in despera-
 
 28 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 tion at the growing Treasury deficit, proposed a tax upon the 
 rents of absentee landlords, and the fate of the measure, like 
 all Irish measures, had to be decided in the first instance in 
 England. North's Tory Ministry actually consented to it. 
 Chatham, far from the active world, and too broken in health 
 to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea for it ; 
 but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy 
 absentee proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remon- 
 strance which carried the day against it, and the author of 
 this remonstrance, of all men in the world, was the Irishman 
 Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land himself, devoted 
 all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and variety of his 
 reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with the garb 
 of an enlightened patriotism. 
 
 He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only super- 
 ficially right about America. In the terms of this celebrated 
 remonstrance, as illuminated by his own private correspon- 
 dence, his consistency is revealed. By the very nature of 
 things, he maintained, the central Parliament of a great hetero- 
 geneous Empire must exercise a supreme superintending power 
 and regulate the polity and economy of the several parts as 
 they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would 
 have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the 
 ground of expediency alone, he would certainly have applied 
 to America. The proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and 
 surely logic was never distorted to stranger ends. The 
 " ordinary residence " of the threatened Irish landowners 
 was in England, " to which country they were attached, not 
 only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of 
 indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not con- 
 stitute in themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish 
 Government. They were to be " fined " for living in England, 
 as though that fine were not the most just and politic which 
 could be conceived, if it went even an inch towards establishing 
 the principle that Ireland's affairs were the business of re- 
 sponsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further principle, 
 enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years 
 later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noble- 
 men shared in founding, that " property has its duties as well 
 as its rights." Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 29 
 
 irony, the tax would lead directly to the " separation " of the 
 two Kingdoms both in interest and affection. The Colonies 
 would follow the Irish example, and thus a principle of dis- 
 union and separation would pervade the whole Empire ; the 
 bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which 
 now knit it together would everywhere be loosened, and a 
 narrow, insulated, local feeling and policy would be propor- 
 tionately increased.* Such was Burke's Imperialism, as 
 evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the root of a 
 frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But the 
 idea expressed by Burke the spirit of his whole argument 
 went far beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar 
 tax proposed, as happened in one instance, by a Colony. It 
 was the superbly grandiose expression, and all the more insidi- 
 ously seductive in that it was so grandiose, of a principle which 
 all thinking men now know, or ought to know, is the negation 
 of Empire, which lost us America, which came within an ace 
 of losing us Canada, which might well have lost us South 
 Africa, and which has in very fact lost us, though not yet 
 irrevocably, the " affection," to use Burke's word, of Ireland. 
 We may call local patriotism "narrow and insulated," if we 
 please, but we recognize now, in every case save that of Ireland, 
 that it is the only foundation for, and the only stimulant to, 
 Imperial patriotism. 
 
 Chatham, an Englishman of the English, was nevertheless a 
 better Irishman than Burke, and therefore a better Imperialist. 
 " The tax," he wrote, " was founded on strong Irish policy. 
 England, it is evident, profits by draining Ireland of the vast 
 incomes spent here from that country. But I could not, as a 
 Peer of England, advise the King, on principles of indirect, 
 accidental English policy, to reject a tax on absentees sent 
 over here as the genuine desire of the Commons of Ireland 
 acting in their proper and peculiar sphere, and exercising their 
 inherent exclusive right by raising supplies in the manner they 
 judge best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same 
 argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next 
 year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was 
 right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that 
 
 * Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. ii., 
 pp. 124-126.
 
 30 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Com- 
 mons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though 
 without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so dis- 
 tasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial 
 independence remained unassailable, and eventually the Irish 
 Parliament itself summoned up the courage to adopt and act 
 upon it. 
 
 It may seem almost impossible that in a body so corrupt 
 and exclusive a national sentiment should have arisen. But 
 every elective assembly, however badly constituted, contains 
 the seeds of its own regeneration, and, under even moderately 
 favourable circumstances, moves irresistibly towards freedom. 
 The pity was that circumstances, save for one brief and in- 
 vigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ire- 
 land. The task was enormous, demanding infinitely more 
 self-sacrifice than even the ablest and most prescient of her 
 Parliamentarians realized. Until it was too late, in fact, they 
 never awoke to the true nature of the task, dazzled by illusory 
 victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish Parliament was, 
 they sought, strengthened by popular influences, to make it 
 the instrument for freeing Ireland from a paralyzing servitude ; 
 and up to a point they succeeded, but they did not see that 
 the only security for real and permanent success was to reform 
 the Parliament itself. There the inveterate spirit of creed and 
 class ascendancy, resting in the last resort on English military 
 power, survived long enough to nullify their efforts. 
 
 The American Revolution and the Irish revolutionary re- 
 naissance the one achieved by a long and bitter war, the other 
 without bloodshed originated and culminated together, were 
 derived from the same sources, and ran their course in close 
 connection. In Ireland the movement was exclusively Pro- 
 testant, in America unsectarian ; but in both cases finance was 
 the lever of emancipation. America, resenting the commercial 
 restrictions imposed by the Mother Country, but not, until 
 passion had obscured all landmarks, contesting their abstract 
 justice, and suffering no great material harm from their inci- 
 dence, fought for the principle of self-taxation a principle 
 which did, of course, logically include, as the Americans in- 
 stinctively felt, that of commercial freedom. Ireland, harassed 
 by commercial restrictions far more onerous, naturally regarded
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 31 
 
 their abolition as vital, and the control of internal taxation as 
 subsidiary. Apart from concrete grievances, both countries 
 had to fear an unlimited extension of British claims founded 
 on the all-embracing Declaratory Acts of 1719 and 1766. 
 
 Unfortunately for herself, Ireland for seventy years or more 
 had been steadily supplying America with the human elements 
 of resistance in their most energetic and independent form, 
 and robbing herself proportionately Approximately, how 
 many Protestants belonging mainly to Ulster, whether through 
 eviction from the land, industrial unemployment, or disgust 
 at social and political ostracism, left Ireland for America in 
 the course of the eighteenth century, it is impossible to say ; 
 but the number, both relatively to population and relatively 
 to the total emigration, Catholic and Protestant, to all parts 
 of the world, was undoubtedly very large. Mr. Egerton, in 
 his " Origin and Growth of the English Colonies," reckons that 
 in 1775 a sixth part of the thirteen insurrectionary Colonies 
 was composed of Scots-Irish exiles from Ulster, and that half 
 the Protestant population of that Province emigrated to those 
 Colonies between 1730 and 1770. As the crisis approached, 
 emigration became an exodus. Thirty thousand of the farming 
 class are said to have been driven west by the wholesale evic- 
 tions of the early seventies, and ten thousand weavers followed 
 them during the disastrous depression in the linen trade caused 
 by interruption of commerce with America. The majority 
 went to the northern Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, took 
 from the first a vehement stand against the Royal claims, and 
 supplied some of Washington's best soldiers. A minority went 
 to the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, and 
 were little heard of until as late in the war as 1780, when 
 Tarleton began his anti-guerilla campaign in the South. Then 
 they woke up, and became, like their compatriots of the North, 
 formidable and implacable foes. 
 
 Ireland and America, therefore, embarked on their struggle 
 with the English Parliament in close sympathy. The treatise 
 of Molyneux on Irish liberty was read with wide approval in 
 America. Franklin visited and encouraged the Irish patriots, 
 and the Americans in 1775 issued a special address to them, 
 asserting an identity of interest. Chatham, on the eve of war, 
 dwelt strongly in the House of Lords upon the same identity
 
 32 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of interest, and in doing so expressly coupled together Irish 
 Catholics and Protestants. 
 
 Although united by interest and sentiment, Ireland and 
 America entered on the struggle under widely varying condi- 
 tions. The American Colonies were thirteen separate units, 
 with only a rude organization for common action, and in each 
 of these units there existed a cleavage of opinion, based neither 
 on class nor creed, between rebels and loyalists. In spite of 
 this weakness, the revolt was thoroughly national in the sense 
 that it was organized and maintained through the State 
 Assemblies, resting on a broad popular franchise. In Ireland, 
 unbought and unofficial opinion was united against England. 
 On the other hand, there was no national Legislature ; only 
 an enslaved and unrepresentative Legislature, tempered by a 
 band of exceptionally brilliant and upright men, and continually 
 thrust forward in spite of itself into bold and independent 
 action by unconstitutional pressure from the unrepresented 
 elements outside. Success so won, as we shall see, was 
 delusive. 
 
 We may note two important additional circumstances : first, 
 the dense mist of ignorance in which, and largely in conse- 
 quence of which, England began her quarrel both with America 
 and Ireland. The average Englishman was probably even 
 more ignorant of Ireland, which was sixty miles away, than of 
 America, which was three thousand miles away. I am not at 
 all sure that that fact is not true still. At any rate, it was 
 true then. Yet knowledge of Ireland was more necessary, 
 because her condition was bad in ways unknown in America. 
 In all the essentials of material well-being, America was 
 supremely fortunate, while Ireland was in the depths of misery. 
 It is not that this misery went undescribed or unlamented, 
 or that it was not realized by a small number of Englishmen. 
 Some of the most famous writings of the time, from the 
 mordant satire of Swift to the learned and elaborate diagnosis 
 of Arthur Young, laid bare the hideous ravages wrought 
 by misrule in Ireland ; but they had little or no effect upon 
 English statesmen, and were unread by the only classes from 
 which, if they had had knowledge, proper practical sympathy 
 might have come. Until Townshend's Viceroyalty (1767-1772) 
 most of the Irish Viceroys were absentees for the greater part
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 33 
 
 of their term of office, leaving the conduct of Irish affairs to 
 English Bishops and Judges, the wisest and most humane of 
 whom could make little or no impression on English official 
 indifference. American Governors were at any rate resident, 
 or mainly resident, and a few were good and popular adminis- 
 trators, though the information which most of them supplied 
 to the Home Government showed a blindness to what was 
 going on under their very eyes which would be incompre- 
 hensible if we did not know by experience that it is the 
 invariable result of irresponsible rule over white men, 
 whether at home or abroad. If, without the presence of race 
 distinctions, it needed Parliamentary reform in England itself 
 to force the ruling class to study with real sympathy the needs, 
 character, and desires of their own people, naturally the same 
 ruling class, sending out its own members or dependents to 
 America, obtained the most grotesquely distorted notions of 
 what Americans were and what they wanted or resented. 
 "Their office," wrote Franklin of the Governors,* "makes 
 them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being 
 conscious that they are hated, they become malicious. Their 
 malice urges them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in 
 their letters to Administration, representing them as dis- 
 affected and rebellious, and (to encourage the use of severity) 
 as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly. Government believes 
 all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance its officers," 
 etc. The same spirit pervades the official correspondence of 
 even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and 
 ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were 
 at all times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension 
 which needed only skilful fomentation by her English rulers 
 to ruin all hopes of reconciliation and unity. That phase was 
 to come after the first Irish victories. For the present the 
 system for it can scarcely be called a policy was to irritate 
 all Irishmen and all Americans alike, irrespective of creed, 
 class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each side of the 
 Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people. 
 
 The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. 
 Holland in his " Imperium et Libertas," is the confusion of 
 political ideas in regard to the status of white dependencies 
 
 * Trevelyan, " The American Revolution," vol. i., p. 16. 
 
 3
 
 34 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 a confusion greatly augmented by loose and misleading analo- 
 gies with India and the tropical Colonies. Even a genius b'ke 
 Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled. Chatham 
 came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak 
 of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw 
 liim back on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong. 
 It was not fully understood that there must be a radical differ- 
 ence between the government of places settled and populated 
 by white colonists and of places merely exploited by white 
 traders. All the prerogatives of the Crown and Parliament 
 were theoretically valid over both classes of dependency, and 
 to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to 
 be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy. Honest and fair- 
 minded politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local 
 freedom with Imperial unity. We have the key now, though 
 we have made no use of it in Ireland ; but most of our fore- 
 fathers not only had no glimmering of the truth when the 
 fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war itself, 
 and remained unenlightened for sixty years more. If the 
 renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the 
 negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite 
 certain that friction would have subsequently arisen on other 
 points. The idea of what we now know as " responsible 
 government " was unknown. Short of coercive war, there 
 seemed to be only two altogether logical alternatives com- 
 plete separation and legislative Union. America obtained the 
 one, Ireland was eventually to undergo the other ; but it is 
 interesting to remember that suggestions, rejected by Franklin 
 as useless, were made for the representation of the American 
 Colonies in the English Parliament, just as suggestions for a 
 legislative Union between Ireland and England appeared inter- 
 mittently all through the eighteenth century, long before such 
 a Union was a question of practical politics. 
 
 I need only briefly summarize the incidents which ended in 
 the year 1782 with the final loss of the American Colonies, and 
 the simultaneous achievement by Ireland of an apparent legis- 
 lative independence. To take America first, the Stamp Act 
 was passed in 1765, and, thanks to the tumult it created, 
 repealed by the Whigs in 1766, though the Declaratory Act 
 which accompanied the repeal neutralized its good results.
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 35 
 
 The new Revenue Duties on glass, paper, painters' colours, 
 and tea were imposed in 1767, reviving the old irritation, and 
 all but that on tea were removed, after a period of growing 
 friction, in 1770. Another comparative lull was succeeded by 
 fresh disorder when in 1773 the East India Company was 
 permitted to send tea direct to America, and Boston celebrated 
 its historic " tea-party." The coercion of Massachusetts fol- 
 lowed, with Gage as despotic Military Governor, and, as a 
 result, all the Colonies were galvanized into unity. In Sep- 
 tember, 1774, the Continental Congress met, framed a Declara- 
 tion of Rights, and obtained a general agreement to cease from 
 all commerce with Britain until grievances were redressed. 
 Fresh coercion having been applied, war broke out in 1775. 
 The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, 
 by John Hancock, President of Congress and the descendant 
 of an Ulster exile, and was first read aloud in Philadelphia by 
 Captain John Nixon, the son of an evicted Wexford farmer. 
 Another Irishman, General Montgomery, led the invasion of 
 Canada.* The war, with manifold vicissitudes, dragged on for 
 eight years ; but the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown on 
 October 19, 1781, virtually ended the physical struggle, while 
 the resolution of the House of Commons on February 27, 1782, 
 against the further prosecution of hostilities, ended the contest 
 of principle. 
 
 The turning-point had been the intervention of the French 
 in 1778, and the same event was to turn the scale in Ireland. 
 There, for many years past, the public finances had been 
 sinking into a more and more scandalous condition. Taxation 
 was by no means heavy, but pensions and sinecures multiplied, 
 and the debt swelled. Inevitably there grew up within Parlia- 
 ment a small independent opposition which would not be 
 bribed into conniving at the ruin of Ireland, while even bought 
 placemen were stung into throwing their votes into the Irish 
 rather than the English scale. Frequent efforts were made to 
 use the insufficiency of the hereditary revenue as a lever for 
 gaining control of finance and for obtaining domestic reform. 
 An Octennial Act, passed in 1768, went a little way towards 
 transforming Parliament from a permanent privileged Com- 
 mittee, under the control of the Executive, into the semblance 
 
 * See " The Irish Kace in America," by Captain Ed. O'Meagher Condore.
 
 36 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 at least of a free Assembly, and the first dissolution under this 
 Act, in 1776, produced the famous Parliament which, though 
 elected on the same narrow and corrupt basis as before, in the 
 space of six years first admitted the principle of toleration for 
 all creeds, and wrested from English hands commercial and 
 legislative autonomy. It came too late to avert if, indeed, it 
 could ever have averted the implication of Ireland in the 
 American War, its predecessor of 1775 having, in defiance 
 of Irish opinion, subscribed an Address to the Crown, express- 
 ing "abhorrence" of the American revolt and "inviolable 
 attachment to the just rights " of the King's Government, 
 and having obediently voted four thousand Irish troops for 
 the war. 
 
 Nor, for all the impassioned eloquence of Grattan and 
 Hussey Burgh, did the real driving-power of the new Parlia- 
 ment come from within its own ranks, but from the unrepre- 
 sented multitude outside. A clause removing the test from 
 Dissenters was struck out of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, 
 mainly owing to dictation from England, but partly from 
 resentment against Presbyterian sympathy with the American 
 cause. It was only in 1780, when the Presbyterians were en- 
 rolled in that formidable revolutionary organization known as 
 the Volunteers, that a test which had excluded them from all 
 share in the government of their adopted country for seventy- 
 four years was repealed. As for the Catholics, the small 
 measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition 
 anywhere. Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against 
 worship and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and 
 the sheer impossibility of enforcement. The religion, naturally, 
 had thriven under persecution, so that in spite of the Code's 
 manifold temptations to recant, only four thousand converts 
 had been registered in the last fifty years. The laws designed 
 to safeguard the wholesale confiscations of the previous century 
 had long ago achieved their purpose, and men were beginning 
 to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the great 
 mass of the people poor and ignorant. The real spirit of tolera- 
 tion shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of 
 which enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, 
 was small enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics 
 for generations past, the absence of all tendency in them
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 37 
 
 towards counter-persecution, or even towards intolerance of 
 Protestantism in any of its forms, Quaker, Huguenot, Episco- 
 palian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of their own over- 
 whelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the tithes. 
 Politically they were a source of great strength to the Govern- 
 ment. When the Presbyterians condemned the American 
 War, the Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in 
 favour of it as warmly as the tame majority in Parliament. 
 
 Conservatives by religion, their devotion to authority 
 annulled all instincts of revenge for the hideous wrongs of the 
 past. The Government, now on the verge of a war with the 
 two great Catholic Powers of Europe, began to realize this, 
 and to feel the wisdom of some degree of conciliation. After 
 all, only four years before they had not merely tolerated, but 
 established, the Catholic Church in the conquered province of 
 Quebec, with the result that the French Canadians remained 
 loyal during the American War. But neither the Government 
 nor the finest independent men in Parliament not even 
 Grattan entertained the remotest idea of admitting Irish 
 Catholics to any really effective share in the Government 
 which their loyalty made stable. That noble but hopeless 
 conception originated later, as the dynamic impulse for com- 
 mercial freedom and legislative independence was originating 
 now, outside the walls of Parliament. 
 
 The rupture with France in 1778 denuded Ireland of troops, 
 and called into being the Protestant Volunteers ; a disciplined, 
 armed body, headed by leaders as weighty and respectable as 
 Lord Charlemont. This body, formed originally for home 
 defence, by a natural and legitimate transition assumed a 
 political aspect, and demanded from a dismayed and terrorized 
 Government commercial freedom for Ireland. For once in her 
 life Ireland was too strong to be coerced. Punishment like 
 that applied to Massachusetts was physically impossible. The 
 bitter protests of English merchants passed unheeded, and the 
 fiscal claims of the Volunteers, with their cannon labelled 
 "Free Trade or this," were granted in full early in 1780. 
 The moral was to persist. From 40,000 the numbers of 
 the Volunteers rose in the two succeeding years to 80,000, 
 and they stood firm for further concessions. The national 
 movement grew like a river in spate ; it swept forward the
 
 38 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 lethargic Catholics and engulfed Parliament. In a tempest of 
 enthusiasm Grattan's Declaration of Independence was carried 
 unanimously in the Irish House of Commons on April 16, 1782, 
 and a month later received legal confirmation in England at 
 the hands of the same Whig Government and Parliament 
 which broke off hostilities with America, and in the same 
 session. 
 
 America took her own road and worked out her own mag- 
 nificent destiny. Most of us now honour Washington and the 
 citizen troops he led. We say they fought, as Hampden and 
 their English forefathers fought, for a sublime ideal, freedom, 
 and that they were chips of the old block. But let not dis- 
 tance delude us into supposing that they were without the full 
 measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer con- 
 siderable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of 
 smothered revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven 
 years of open war which preceded their victory. Washington's 
 genius carried them safely through the ordeal of the war, and 
 the still more exacting ordeal of political reconstruction after 
 the war, but it is well known how nearly he and his staunchest 
 supporters failed. The Revolution, like all revolutions, brought 
 out all the bad as well as all the good in human nature. Bad 
 laws always deteriorate a people ; they breed a contempt for 
 law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the 
 establishment of good laws. As I have already indicated, the 
 dislike and the systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade 
 laws during the long period when the revolt was incubating 
 harmed American character, and probably sowed the seed of 
 future corruption and dissension. However true that may be, 
 it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more 
 heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irish- 
 man in any other part of the world might have been expected 
 to show under similar conditions. Historians and politicians, 
 to whom legal authority always seems sacrosanct and agita- 
 tion against it a popular vice, who mistake cause and effect 
 so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of character 
 from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case 
 against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same 
 case has, at various times, been made against Home Rule for 
 Canada, South Africa, and Ireland. Since all white men are
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 39 
 
 fundamentally alike in their faults as well as in their virtues, 
 there is always abundant material for an indictment on the 
 ground of bad character. The Americans of the revolutionary 
 war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public spirit, 
 showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking, vin- 
 dictiveness, and incompetence ; and whoever chooses to amass, 
 magnify, and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate 
 their unfitness for self-government just as well as he can 
 demonstrate the same proposition in the case of Ireland. 
 Mr. J. W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining historian of 
 the British Army, has done the former task as well as it can 
 be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts 
 men of his own national stock as the pestilent offspring of 
 an " irreconcilable faction," which had originally left England 
 deeply imbued with the doctrines of Republicanism. Having 
 gained, and by lying and subterfuge retained, some measure 
 of independence, they sank from depth to depth of meanness 
 and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and 
 refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were 
 too contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a 
 head towards the maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is 
 always the " mob," the " ruffians," the " rabble," of Boston 
 who carry out the reprisals against the royal coercion, and, like 
 the Irish peasants of the nineteenth century, they are always 
 the half-blind, half-criminal tools of unscrupulous " agitators." 
 It has been, and remains, an obsession with the partisans of 
 law over liberty all the world over that the fettered community, 
 wherever it may be and however composed, does not really 
 want liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are 
 dragged into an artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and 
 sham patriots a view which is always somewhat difficult to 
 reconcile, as students of American and Irish history are aware, 
 not only with the facts of prolonged and tenacious resistance, 
 but with the other view, equally necessary to the argument 
 for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for liberty ; 
 and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of self-contradiction 
 and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible account of 
 a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was 
 " factitious," initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and 
 sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he
 
 40 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 contends, was " the work of a small but energetic and well- 
 organized minority towards which the mass of the people, 
 when not directly hostile, was mainly indifferent." Happily, 
 Mr. Fortescue's candour as an historian of facts gives us the 
 clue to this strange tangle. We find no evidence that the 
 sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, 
 and whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with 
 ease in co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in 
 fact, a majority, nor that they were either better or worse 
 men, or more or less ardent patriots, than the mutinous 
 minority, or the British regular soldiers themselves. Their 
 loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is sometimes 
 interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious ; 
 they are given to desertion, like Washington's troops, like Lee's 
 and Grant's troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops 
 and like all Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine 
 war with the duty of keeping their homes and business afloat. 
 We find, too, that a counter-current of desertion flows from 
 the British, and still more from the German, regulars, also a 
 natural enough phenomenon in what was virtually a civil war 
 for liberty ; so that " General Greene was often heard to say 
 that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with British 
 soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of America." 
 And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case, 
 exultingly quotes against the Americans " the cynical Benedict 
 Arnold, who knew his countrymen," and who said: "Money 
 will go farther than arms in America." Yet Arnold, whose 
 opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue accepts as correct 
 and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter, but a per- 
 jured military traitor of the most despicable kind. We may 
 conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole 
 Revolution, that Washington not only knew his countrymen, 
 who were Mr. Fortescue's countrymen, better than Arnold, 
 but was a better representative of their dominant character- 
 istics.* 
 
 Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, 
 and we know the source of that prepossession, a passionate 
 love of the British Army, which does him great honour, while 
 it distorts his political vision. I should not refer at such 
 
 * " History of the British Army," vol. iii.
 
 REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 41 
 
 length to his view of the American War were it not that, 
 whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for discus- 
 sion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predomi- 
 nant philosophy. Historical sense seems to vanish, and the 
 same savage racial bias supervenes; whether the unruly people 
 concerned are absolutely consanguineous, closely related, or 
 of foreign nationality. Instead of a general acceptance of 
 the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce under self- 
 government and sink into deterioration and division under 
 coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superi- 
 ority in the dominant people, the same attribution of sordid 
 and ugly motives to the leaders of an unruly people, the same 
 vague idealization of the loyalist minority, the same fixed 
 hallucination that the majority does not want what by all the 
 constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and the corre- 
 spondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a conviction 
 solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while 
 making that very violence an argument for the depravity of 
 those who use it, and a pretext for denying them self-govern- 
 ment. 
 
 All this is terribly true hi the case of Ireland, and when I 
 next revert to the American continent, the reader will observe 
 that the same ideas were entertained towards Canada, the only 
 white Colony left to the British Empire after the loss of the 
 thirteen States.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 GEATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 
 
 WE left Ireland in 1782 apparently in possession of a triumph 
 as great as that of America, though won without bloodshed 
 and without the least tincture of sedition ; for the Volunteers 
 of 1782 were as loyal to the Crown as the most ardent American 
 royalists. In the light of political ideas developed at a much 
 later period, we know that the American Colonies might have 
 remained within the Empire, even if their utmost claims had 
 been granted. Had the idea of responsible government been 
 understood, it would have been realized that their exclusive 
 control of taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with 
 Imperial Union, but essential to it. Grattan and his Irish 
 friends, ignorant of the true solution, honestly thought, in the 
 intoxication of the moment, that they had solved the problem 
 so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of ethnology 
 and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and 
 England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood 
 together, like Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister 
 nations, with the old irritating servitude swept away, and the 
 bonds of natural affection and natural interest substituted. 
 That the close proximity of the two nations, however marked 
 the contrast between their natural characteristics, made these 
 bonds far more necessary and valuable than in the case of 
 America, stood to reason, and, again, the fact was recognized 
 in Anglo-Irish relations. America had fought rather than 
 submit to a forced contribution to Imperial funds. Nobody 
 in Ireland, in or out of Parliament, had ever objected in prin- 
 ciple to an indirect voluntary contribution in troops, and now 
 that the American War was ended, non-Parliamentary objections 
 to one particular application of the principle had no further 
 substance. Nor, as was shortly to be shown in the reception 
 
 42
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 43 
 
 given in Ireland to Pitt's abortive Commercial Propositions of 
 1785, was there any objection to a direct contribution in money 
 on a fixed annual scale in return for a mutual free trade.* 
 The sun had surely risen over a free yet loyal Ireland. 
 
 Never was there a more complete delusion. It would have 
 been far better for Ireland if she had never had a Parliament at 
 all, but had had to seek her own salvation in the healthy 
 rough-and-tumble of domestic revolution. The mere name of 
 " Parliament " seems perpetually to have hypnotized even its 
 best members, and the illusion was at its highest now. Nothing 
 essential had been changed. Commercial freedom was the 
 most real gain, because it involved the definite repeal of certain 
 trade-laws and the permission to Ireland to make what she 
 liked and send it where she liked ; but it was a small gain 
 without some means of finding out what Ireland really liked, 
 and translating that will, without external pressure, into law. 
 The Parliament was neither an organ of public opinion 
 nor a free agent. It was even more corrupt and less 
 representative than before. It was as completely under the 
 control of the English Government as before. The modern 
 conception of a Colonial Ministry serving under a constitu- 
 tional Governor selected by the Crown, but acting with 
 the advice of his Ministry, was unknown. The English 
 Government, through its Lord-Lieutenant, still appointed 
 English Ministers in Ireland, and in the hands of these 
 Ministers lay not only that large portion of the national 
 income known as the hereditary revenue, but the whole 
 machinery of patronage and corruption. Even the legislative 
 independence was unreal ; for majorities still had to be bought, 
 Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is, 
 English ministerial assent ; so that powerful English pressure 
 could be, and was, brought to bear upon their policy and con- 
 struction. And the worst of it was that English pressure here 
 and elsewhere meant then what it meant in the next century, 
 and what it too often means now, English party pressure 
 exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve 
 sectional English ends. In short, Ireland, so far from being 
 
 * Pitt's original scheme was accepted in Ireland, but defeated in England, 
 owing to the angry opposition of British commercial interests. The scheme, 
 as amended to conciliate these interests, was deservedly rejected in Ireland.
 
 44 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 a nation, was still virtually a Colony, subjected to the worst 
 conceivable form of colonial Government, groaning under 
 economic evils unknown in the least fortunate of the Colonies, 
 and without the numerous mitigating circumstances and the 
 hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the seat of Em- 
 pire. On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all, 
 nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages 
 were about to culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, 
 complicated immensely the problem of regeneration in Ireland. 
 What was the remedy ? Parliamentary reform. The 
 Volunteers saw this instantly. Parliament itself scouted the 
 idea of reform, because it threatened the Protestant ascend- 
 ancy. Any weakening of the Protestant ascendancy was un- 
 thinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in 1778 
 had coined the grandiose phrase that " the Irish Protestant 
 could never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a 
 slave," and who afterwards explained what he meant by 
 saying that the liberty of the Catholic was to be only such as 
 was " entirely consistent with the Protestant ascendancy," 
 and that "the Protestant interest was his first object." 
 Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland 
 was fundamental. What was its corollary ? Dependence on 
 England. Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, 
 or, as in Ireland, on both, cannot last in any white community 
 without external support, and the external support for ascen- 
 dancy in Ireland was English force without and English bribes 
 within. There was the chain of causation, the vicious circle 
 rather ; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought 
 he had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences 
 which were throttling her. He could not see that the more he 
 wrestled for the independence of a sham Parliament, while 
 resisting its transformation into a real Parliament, the more he 
 strengthened those influences, because he inevitably widened 
 the gulf between Parliament and the Irish people. The 
 glamour his brilliant gifts had thrown over the Irish Parliament 
 only served to divert his own mind and the minds of other 
 talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ire- 
 land. Time and talent were wasted from the first over points 
 of pride, trivialities which seemed portentous to over-sensitive 
 minds ; metaphysical puzzles as to the exact nature of the
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 45 
 
 relations now existing between Ireland and England ; whether 
 the repeal of the Poynings' Act and the Declaratory Act were 
 sufficient guarantees of freedom ; whether Ireland herself 
 should nominate a Regent or accept the nomination from 
 England. Meanwhile, the sands were running out, and Ireland 
 was a slave to a minute but powerful minority of her sons and, 
 only through them, to England. 
 
 Yet the heart of Ireland was sound. All the materials for 
 regeneration were there. The Catholics, whom by an old 
 inherited instinct Grattan professed to dread, were the most 
 Conservative part of the population, so Conservative as to be 
 unaware of the source of their miseries, without the smallest 
 leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a notion 
 of sedition or rebellion. Paradox as it seems, if they leaned 
 in any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted 
 authority of the day, the Irish Parliament. But the truth is 
 that they were without political consciousness, behind the 
 times, unappreciative of the new forces operating round them. 
 In sore need of courageous and enlightened guidance from men 
 of their own faith, they were almost leaderless. The leeway 
 to be made up after the destructive action of the penal laws 
 was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or 
 will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the 
 further relaxation of those laws, to the education of their 
 backward co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty. 
 For relief they instinctively looked towards the only legal 
 source of relief, though the source of secular oppression, 
 Parliament. But this was habit. The Catholics at this time 
 were like clay in the hands of the potter, open to any curative 
 and ennobling impulse. That impulse came, as was right and 
 natural, from the Protestant side. The only healthy political 
 organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of 
 the North, with their headquarters at Belfast. They repre- 
 sented ah 1 that was best in the Protestant population. They 
 had won the practical victory, such as it was, Parliament, 
 with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular victory. They 
 grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten, and 
 that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering 
 some 80,000 or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, 
 and, since they had no constitutional resources, to overawe
 
 46 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Parliament. Parliament at once stood on its dignity and on 
 its civil rights against the " Pretorian bands." " And now," 
 said Grattan in his magnificent way, " having given a Parlia- 
 ment to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the 
 people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majesti- 
 cally a great work." 
 
 But the work was not begun. Parliament was the enemy 
 of the people, and the Volunteers knew it. Now, what was 
 the " people " in the minds of the Volunteers ? Undoubtedly 
 they did not, after a century of racial ascendancy, perform the 
 miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the principle of 
 absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and 
 Protestant alike. Such mental revulsions rarely occur 
 among men, and when they do occur are apt to produce 
 reactionary cataclysms. But they did from the first give 
 a real meaning to Grattan's vague rhetoric about Catholic 
 slaves ; from the first they made overtures towards the 
 Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic fran- 
 chise as a part of their scheme of reform ten years before 
 that enfranchisement, without Parliamentary reform and 
 therefore valueless, became a practical issue. For the present 
 these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand of the 
 Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin 
 in November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction 
 of Parliament on a democratic Protestant basis. The Catholic 
 franchise had been strongly supported, but by the influence of 
 Charlemont and Flood rejected. It is, of course, easy to main- 
 tain in theory that a democratic Protestant ascendancy so 
 designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom as an aristo- 
 cratic and corrupt ascendancy ; but nobody with faith in 
 human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm 
 that the process of reform would have ended with the enact- 
 ment of the Volunteer Bill. No present-day Protestant Ulster- 
 man should entertain such a dishonouring doubt. Mercifully, 
 men are so made that, if left to themselves, they go forward, 
 not backward. A pure Assembly, formed on the Volunteer 
 plan, stimulated by the enlightened conscience which such an 
 Assembly invariably develops, by the discovery of the funda- 
 mental identity of interests between the great bulk of Catholics 
 and Protestants, and by the manly instinct of self-preservation
 
 GBATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 47 
 
 against undue English encroachment, would have moved 
 rapidly towards tolerance and equality. 
 
 But the Assembly which might have saved Ireland never 
 came into being. The Volunteers were in weak and incom- 
 petent hands. The metamorphosis they had undergone from 
 a body formed for home defence into a militant political 
 organization found them at the critical moment unprovided 
 with the right stamp of leader. Flood, who helped to draft 
 their Bill, was a brilliant but unscrupulous and discredited 
 Parliamentarian, and a fanatical advocate of an unimpaired 
 Protestant ascendancy. Lord Charlemont, one of the most 
 influential founders of the movement, and a man of the highest 
 integrity, was lukewarm for reform, an aristocrat and an 
 ascendancy man to the finger-tips, dreading the mysterious 
 forces he had helped to call into being, and desirous to keep 
 them, as he said, " respectable." Was it respectable for armed 
 men to dictate to a Parliament, however just their cause ? 
 As often happens in the ferment of popular movements, the 
 one leader who spoke undiluted truth and sense spoke it hi 
 florid and unmeasured language and was himself of a figure 
 and behaviour little likely to inspire permanent confidence. 
 This was the famous Bishop of Derry, called by Charlemont a 
 blasphemous Deist, by Wesley an exemplary Divine, by Fox 
 a dishonest madman, and by Jeremy Bentham " a most 
 excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred, and 
 liberal-minded to the last degree." He was certainly vain and 
 ostentatious, certainly a democratic free-thinker, but a full 
 knowledge of his character is not of much concern to us. The 
 point is that he was right about Ireland's needs, though the 
 wrong man at the moment to drive home her claims. Many 
 finer agitators than he have failed in causes just as good. 
 Many without half his merits have succeeded. We shall find 
 his Canadian counterparts later in the figures of Mackenzie 
 and Papineau. 
 
 The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform 
 Bill reached Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing 
 the Volunteer dress. It was rejected on the first vote. No 
 doubt the circumstances were humiliating, and if there had 
 been any serious inclination in Parliament towards self-reform 
 and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous monopoly,
 
 48 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 we should freely forgive rejection. But there was little or 
 none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not 
 in the dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that 
 the Volunteers themselves were overawed by a strong body of 
 British regular troops, mustered for the occasion under General 
 Burgoyne. The vicious circle was complete. Forced to choose 
 between reform and dependence on England, Parliament chose 
 the latter. And only a year and a half before Grattan had 
 dazzled his hears with the words : " Ireland is now a nation . . . 
 esto perpetua" 
 
 There are very few critical dates in Irish history, and of 
 those few the night of November 29, 1783, was the most critical 
 of all. It marked the climax of a brief and bright renaissance 
 from the long stagnation of the eighteenth, and heralded a 
 decline into the long agony of the nineteenth century, a 
 decline concealed by the fictitious lustre which still hangs over 
 the first decade of Grattan 's unreformed Parliament, but none 
 the less already present. The Volunteers, their grand oppor- 
 tunity lost, slowly broke up. Should they have used force, 
 even under the threat of Burgoyne 's guns ? It would have 
 been infinitely better both for England and Ireland if they had. 
 Nothing but force could avail. Never would force have been 
 better justified, for the very soul of a people " rang zwischen 
 Tod und Leben." 
 
 It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not 
 appreciating the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accord- 
 ingly. They were ahead of their time as it was in the political 
 instinct which taught them the vital importance of a reformed 
 Parliament. They were far ahead of England, where the 
 younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months before, 
 and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for 
 Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious 
 tolerance witness the Gordon riots in London two years 
 before. Their Parliament wore the crown and spoke the 
 regal language of a patriot Assembly. For five years they 
 themselves had glorified justifiably in the perfect discipline and 
 sobriety with which they had used their irregular power. Their 
 most trusted leaders suggested that they would yet achieve 
 their ends without violence, while the large majority of the 
 Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 49 
 
 Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action 
 which, although in itself not in the remotest degree connected 
 with dynastic questions, involved a theoretical conflict with 
 the Crown, and perhaps an actual collision with Royal troops. 
 One of the last acts of the Volunteer Convention, before its 
 dissolution, was to pass an address to the King expressing 
 fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their quiet and 
 dignified behaviour hi the past, and praying that " their 
 humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Par- 
 liamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the 
 Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed 
 to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable 
 desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction 
 of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union 
 of the two kingdoms." This document might have been 
 copied mutatis mutandis from the American petitions prior to 
 the war, and was to be reproduced almost word for word in 
 Canadian petitions dealing with less serious grievances whose 
 neglect at the hands of the Government did actually lead to 
 armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly says, 
 as the " defence of the Convention before the bar of history." 
 Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, 
 it was a vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future ; 
 for "from that time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction 
 sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could 
 only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might 
 be already foreseen." 
 
 The story of that transition, with all its disastrous conse- 
 quences in the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of 
 healing forces, in the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and 
 hatreds, in the artificial transformation of Catholics into anti- 
 English rebels, and Protestants into anti-Irish Loyalists, in 
 the long agony of the land war, the tithe war, the Church war, 
 and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion itself, is one of 
 the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because you can 
 watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a 
 people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against 
 nature, visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical 
 figures stand out : the strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing 
 ascendancy in its crudest and ugliest form ; at the other 
 
 4
 
 50 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of Wolfe Tone, 
 affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the 
 case that " to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Govern- 
 ment, to break the connection with England, the never-failing 
 source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence 
 of my country these were my objects." Midway stands 
 Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned " Girondin," as Mr. 
 Fisher aptly calls him,* blind until it was too late to the errors 
 which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring in despair 
 when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of 
 the water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, 
 while there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently 
 turning, when that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free 
 trade in 1785 and the Catholic franchise in 1793 ; and mean- 
 while, with an undercurrent of cool scepticism, preparing the 
 ground for the only alternative to Reform, short of a revolu- 
 tionary separation of the two countries, legislative Union, and 
 remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only available 
 means, bribery. 
 
 In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scape- 
 goats. Tracing events to their source, we strike against two 
 obstructions, proximity and ignorance, and we may as well 
 make them our scapegoats. If proximity had implied know- 
 ledge and forbearance, all would have been well, but it implied 
 just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of solution which, 
 after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the teeth of 
 ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of 
 Canada and South Africa. 
 
 The immediate cause is clear. The failure of Reform is the 
 key to the Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to 
 idealize Grattan's Parliament, with a view to justifying later 
 claims for autonomy, Irishmen have generally shut their eyes 
 to this cardinal fact, and have preferred to dwell with exag- 
 gerated emphasis on the little good that Parliament did rather 
 than on the enormous evils which it not only left untouched, 
 but scarcely observed. We must remember that it was not 
 only a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an 
 infusion of lawyers and others devoted to the interest of land- 
 
 * J. Fisher, "The End of the Irish Parliament." The author is much 
 indebted to this brilliant study, which appeared only this year (1911).
 
 GKATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 61 
 
 lords. In that capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much 
 less of remedying, the gravest material ills of Ireland. In the 
 very narrow domain where the landlord interest was not con- 
 cerned, as in industrial and commercial matters, Parliament 
 seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom. It en- 
 deavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander 
 its newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with 
 Great Britain, where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still 
 continued to be imposed. But Ireland was no longer an in- 
 dustrial country. All the encouragement in the world could 
 not replace lost aptitudes or bring back the exiled craftsmen 
 who, during a century past, had left Ireland to enrich European 
 countries with their skill. The favoured linen industry alone 
 survived to reach its present flourishing condition. The revival 
 in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was remark- 
 ably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and 
 transient. No wonder ; for, while Ireland had been stagnant 
 for a century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily 
 building up that capacity for organized industry which, under 
 the inventive genius of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and 
 the economic genius of Adam Smith, made the last twenty 
 years of the eighteenth century such a marvellous period of 
 industrial expansion, and eventually converted England from 
 an agricultural into a manufacturing nation. Ireland was 
 hopelessly late in the race. On the other hand, the fertile 
 land of Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth 
 and the prime means of subsistence for the great bulk of the 
 four and a half million souls who inhabited the country. Par- 
 liament seems to have been almost indifferent to the miseries 
 of the agricultural population, wholly indifferent, certainly, to 
 their source, the vicious agrarian system which it was the 
 interest of its own members to sustain. Foster's famous Corn 
 Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with 
 the inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, 
 gave a powerful though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the 
 trade in corn. But it enriched only the landlords, and left 
 untouched the real abuses, absenteeism, middlemanism, in- 
 security of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes. The Whiteboy 
 risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met with 
 Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth
 
 62 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 century. The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into 
 civil war in the nineteenth century, was never touched. While 
 tenants in North-East Ulster wore painfully and forcibly estab- 
 lishing their custom of tenant right in the teeth of the law, the 
 inhuman system of cottier tenancy, which was to last until 
 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in other parts of 
 Ireland. 
 
 None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have 
 grappled with these evils ; nor is there any reason to suppose 
 that in the existing condition of Ireland a Protestant demo- 
 cratic Assembly, even if temporarily it retained its sectarian 
 character, would have grappled with them less boldly and 
 drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and Pro- 
 testants. The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the 
 people were the same, while the education and intelligence be- 
 longed mainly to the Protestants. Ulster tenants had as much 
 need of good land laws as other tenants. Tithes were as much 
 disliked in the north as in the south. The Established Church 
 was the Church of a very small minority, and its clergy, 
 numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as 
 the absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and 
 pensioners. 
 
 But with no redress, and, what is more important, no 
 prospect of redress for the primary ills of Ireland, the centri- 
 fugal forces of religion and race had full scope for their baneful 
 influence. And it was at the very moment when tolerance was 
 steadily gaining ground among all classes that these spectres 
 of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good work. 
 
 How did this come about ? Let us remember once more 
 that everything hinged on Reform. Reform gained a little, 
 but suffered far more, by its association with the question of 
 Catholic franchise, which was useless without Reform, while 
 it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more remarkable 
 than the growth of academic tolerance during this period, 
 doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is 
 true that the great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the 
 vote and removing a quantity of other disqualifications, would 
 scarcely have been sanctioned by the Parliamentary managers 
 without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose mind was strongly 
 influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just taken by the
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 53 
 
 French Revolution ; but, once sanctioned, it passed rapidly, 
 and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at 
 large. Without " Emancipation," that is, the permission to 
 elect Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the 
 franchise was illusory and even harmful. In the counties the 
 forty-shilling " freehold " vote (" freehold " was an ironical 
 misnomer) encouraged Protestant landlords for another genera- 
 tion, before and after the Union, still further to subdivide 
 already excessively small holdings, while the benefits to be 
 derived from the admission to power of propertied Catholics, 
 with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown 
 away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform 
 was a complete farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the 
 Parliamentary balance, were the personal property of Pro- 
 testant landlords, and the 110 Parliamentary placemen were 
 indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of light and leading 
 contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system which, 
 in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of 
 them had some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became 
 a strong Emancipator, but remained an academic and in- 
 effectual reformer striving in vain to reconcile Reform with 
 a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a determination to 
 keep power in the hands of landed property. In England, 
 which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have 
 done no more harm than Burke, who for the same reason 
 fought Reform as strongly as Pitt and his father Chatham 
 had advocated it. But in Ireland, which was Catholic and 
 Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian landed 
 property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charle- 
 mont was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic 
 Reformer before Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving 
 at the same sterility as Grattan through a religious bias which 
 Grattan ceased to feel, a bias inspired, not by a fanatical fear of 
 democracy in itself, but by a fear of Catholic revenge for past 
 wrongs. These men and their like, admirable and lovable as 
 in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in those 
 terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by 
 Reform, had any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, 
 when the Whig Viceroy Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the 
 eighteenth century who ever conceived the idea of governing
 
 54 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Ireland according to Irish ideas, came over from England with 
 the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter of conjecture. 
 Fiizwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under cir- 
 cumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All 
 wo can say with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at 
 largo was absolutely ignored, and that English party intrigues 
 and English claims on Irish patronage had much to do with 
 the result. On the whole, however, I agree with Mr. Fisher 
 that too much importance has been given to this episode, 
 especially by Mr. Lccky, who devotes nearly a volume to it. 
 
 The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. 
 Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power 
 for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers 
 of Wolfe Tone's middle-class Protestant school had turned, 
 under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, 
 into revolutionaries. Reform had been refused in 1782 ; again, 
 and without coercion from the Volunteers, in 1783. It was 
 refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at the 
 instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had 
 urged what a grim irony it seems ! to give " unanswerable 
 proofs that the cases of Ireland and England are different," 
 and who answered with truth that the ascendancy of a minority 
 could only be maintained " by force or corruption." Every 
 succeeding year showed the same results. Wolfe Tone was 
 more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his Society 
 of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary 
 organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the 
 Executive which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ire- 
 land. Since the symbol of the Irish Executive was the British 
 Crown, he, of course, abjured the Crown, though he had no 
 more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the American 
 or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from 
 the first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Toler- 
 ance to him was not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of 
 democracy. He took little interest in the Parliamentary side 
 of Catholic relief, realizing its hollow unreality, and, in the 
 case of the Bill of 1793, actually ridiculing the absurd spectacle 
 of the Catholic cottiers being herded to the poll by their 
 Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme Democrat, 
 for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 55 
 
 franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but 
 the most sober political common sense. 
 
 His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a 
 Government which did not emanate from or represent them, 
 and which was ruinous to them. It is not surprising that he 
 failed. Ireland was very near England. French intervention 
 had been decisive in distant America, and the French Revolu- 
 tion in its turn had been hastened by the American example. 
 But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for 
 purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command 
 of the sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of 
 little material value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish 
 Revolutionists. It is the manner of Tone's failure and the 
 consequences of his failure that have such a tragic interest. 
 A united Ireland could have dispensed with the aid of France. 
 What prevented unity ? Tone laboured to bring both creeds 
 together, and to a certain degree was successful. Until the 
 very last it was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank 
 most from revolution. Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the 
 North never moved, while Catholic Wexford and Wicklow rose. 
 
 The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose 
 long neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest 
 justification for Reform. The Orange Society, founded under 
 that name in 1795, originated in the " Peep o' Day Boys," a 
 local association formed in Armagh in 1784 for the purpose 
 of bullying Catholics. There is no doubt that the underlying 
 incentive was economic. Even when the Penal Code had lost 
 in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of 
 the persecuted Catholics. As I pointed out in a former 
 chapter, the reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating 
 leases and fixing new rents by auction, with the alternative of 
 eviction, threw those Protestant tenants who did not emigrate 
 into direct competition with Catholic peasants of a lower 
 economic stamp, who because they lived on little could afford 
 to offer fancy rents. Hence much bitter friction, leading to 
 sordid village rows and eventually to the organized ruffianism 
 of the Peep o' Day Boys. The Catholic Franchise Act of 
 1793, unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified 
 the trouble by removing the landlord's motive to prefer a 
 Protestant tenant on account of his vote. Under ill-treatment,
 
 66 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the Catholics naturally retaliated with a society known as 
 the " Defenders," and in some districts were themselves the 
 aggressors. Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect, spread 
 to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and 
 became merged in Wliiteboyism. This had always been an 
 agrarian movement, directed against abuses which the law 
 refused to touch, and without religious animus, although the 
 overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in the regions where it 
 flourished would have placed the Protestants at their mercy. 
 In Ulster both the contending organizations necessarily ac- 
 quired a religious form and necessarily retained it. But at 
 bottom bad laws, not bigotry, were the cause. There was 
 nothing incurable, or even unique, about the disorders. 
 Analogous phenomena have appeared elsewhere, for example, 
 in Australia, between the original squatters on large ranches 
 and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for 
 closer settlement. Under a rational system of tenure and dis- 
 tribution there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even 
 larger population. Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, 
 seems never to have appreciated what was going on. So 
 far from healing the schism, he appears to have widened 
 it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into 
 the scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen. But, 
 in truth, he was helpless. Good administration only could 
 unite these distracted elements, and without the Reform for 
 which he battled, good administration was impossible. The 
 dissension, widening and acquiring an increasingly religious 
 and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which originally was 
 the seat of the Revolution. The forces normally at work to 
 favour law and order loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the 
 French Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish con- 
 spiracies gathered proportionately greater strength. 
 
 The Southern Rebellion of 1798 a mad, pitiful thing at the 
 best, the work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted 
 minds the splendid ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to pene- 
 trate was a totally different sort of rebellion from any he had 
 contemplated. It was neither national nor Republican. The 
 French invasions had met with little support ; the first with 
 positive reprobation. Nor was it in origin sectarian, although, 
 once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of the
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 57 
 
 prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined 
 in it because they were the only friends the people had 
 had in the dark ages of oppression. In so far as it can 
 be regarded as spontaneous, it was of Whiteboy origin, 
 anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even spon- 
 taneous ; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which 
 emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and dis- 
 arm, prior to the outbreak, together with the skilfully propa- 
 gated reports of a coming massacre by Orangemen, would have 
 goaded any peasantry in the world to revolt, and the only 
 astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local and sporadic. 
 General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the 
 horrors he was forbidden to avert. " Within these twelve 
 months," he wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time 
 of his resignation, " every crime, every cruelty that could be 
 committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here. 
 . . . The struggle has been, in the first place, whether I was 
 to have the command of the Army really or nominally, and 
 then whether the character and discipline of it were to be 
 degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from 
 the facility of one man or from the violence and oppression 
 of a set of men who have for more than twelve months 
 employed it in measures which they durst not avow or 
 sanction." 
 
 Abercromby 's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, " took 
 away the last faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitz- 
 gibbon, Lord Clare, was now supreme in the Government, and 
 henceforth represents incarnate the forces which provoked the 
 Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He had bided his 
 time for a decade, watching the trend of events, foreseeing 
 their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual 
 writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a 
 block of black granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe 
 Tone, who was his anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in 
 intellect, his superior in morals, but no more than his rival in 
 sincerity, clarity, and consistency of ideas. Clare was a pro- 
 duct of the Penal Code, the son of a Catholic Irishman who, 
 to obtain a legal career, had become a Protestant. He himself 
 was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a definite theory 
 of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so
 
 S8 THK FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and ho had never 
 scrupled to say HO. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists 
 were robbers in Ireland, and robbers must be tyrants, or the 
 robbed will como by their own again ; that was his whole 
 philosophy,* his frigid and final estimate of the tendencies of 
 human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial 
 fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong 
 on one side, revenge on the other ; policy, coercion. As he put 
 it in his famous speech on the Union, the settlers to the third 
 and fourth generation " were at the mercy of the old inhabi- 
 tants of the island." " Laws must be framed to meet the 
 vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of this sort 
 for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable logic, 
 proj>crly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parlia- 
 ment in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, 
 had shown faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance 
 and the reunion of Irishmen. He never took the trouble to 
 demonstrate the truth of his theory of revenge by a reasoned 
 analysis of Irish symptoms. He took it for granted as part 
 of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all philosophers of his 
 school, pointed to the results of misgovernment and coercion 
 as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their 
 need for more coercion. Anticipating a certain limited class 
 of Irishmen of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he 
 used to bewail English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance 
 of the incurable criminality of his own kith and kin. He was 
 just as immovably cynical about the vast majority of his own 
 co-religionists as about the conquered race. If, as was obvious, 
 so far from fearing the revenge of the Catholics, their unim- 
 peded instinct was to take sides with them to secure good 
 government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who 
 could not see the doom awaiting them. Yet Fitzgibbon's 
 admirers must admit that his consistency was not complete. 
 He was perfectly cognizant of the real causes of Irish discon- 
 tent. He was aware of the grievances of Ulster, and his 
 description of the conditions of the Minister peasantry in the 
 Whileboy debates of 1787 is classical. If pressed, he would 
 have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure 
 
 Hoe Fit/gibbon's Speeches in the Irish House of Lords, on the Catholic 
 Franchise Bill, March 13, 1793, nnd on the Union, February 10, 1800.
 
 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 59 
 
 evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and 
 the condition of its maintenance. That other strange lapse 
 in 1798, when he described the unparalleled prosperity of 
 Ireland since 1782 under a Constitution which, in the Union 
 debates of 1800, he afterwards covered with deserved ridicule 
 as having led to anarchy, destitution, and bankruptcy, must 
 be attributed to the exigencies of debate ; for he was an advo- 
 cate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the 
 temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points. 
 
 These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive 
 coherence of his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most 
 vivid, and the most powerful exponent of a theory of govern- 
 ment which has waged eternal conflict with its polar rival, the 
 Liberal theory, in the evolution of the Empire. The theory, 
 of course, extends much farther than the bi-racial Irish case, 
 to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we shall see, 
 to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South Africa, 
 and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial 
 circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Any- 
 one who reads the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will 
 notice that the opposition rested at bottom on a profoundly 
 pessimistic distrust of the people, and on the alleged necessity 
 of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty of " framing 
 laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature." In a 
 word, the theory is in essence not so much anti-racial as anti- 
 democratic, while finding its easiest application where those 
 distinctions of race and creed exist which it is its effect, though 
 not its purpose, to intensify and envenom. Fitzgibbon is a 
 repulsive figure. Yet it would be unjust to single him out 
 for criticism. Like him, the philosophers Hume and Paley 
 believed in oligarchy, and accepted force or corruption as its 
 two alternative props. Burke thought the same, though the 
 Pitts thought otherwise. Fitzgibbon's brutal pessimism was 
 only the political philosophy of Paley, Hume, and Burke 
 pushed relentlessly in an exceptional case to its extreme logical 
 conclusion. But we can justly criticize statesmen of the 
 present day who, after a century's experience of the refutation 
 of the doctrine in every part of the world, still adhere to it.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE UNION 
 
 THE worst feature of Fitzgibbonism is that it has the power 
 artificially to produce in the human beings subject to it some 
 of the very phenomena which originally existed only in the 
 perverted imagination of its professors. Some only of the 
 phenomena ; not all ; for human nature triumphs even over 
 Fitzgibbonism. There has never been a moment since the 
 Union when a representative Irish Parliament, if statesmen 
 had been wise and generous enough to set such a body up, 
 would have acted on the principle of revenge or persecution. 
 Nor, in spite of all evidences to the contrary, has there ever 
 been a moment when Protestant Ulstermen, heirs of the noble 
 Volunteer spirit, once represented in such a Parliament, would 
 have acted on the assumption that they had to meet a policy 
 of revenge. Nevertheless, Fitzgibbonism did succeed, as it 
 was to succeed in Canada, in making pessimism at least 
 plausible and in achieving an immense amount of direct 
 ascertainable mischief. 
 
 The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal 
 three generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened 
 under the operations of economic forces connected with race 
 and religion, yet perfectly capable of adjustment by a wise 
 and instructed Government, yawned wide from 1798 onwards, 
 when Government had become a soulless policeman, and scenes 
 of frenzy and slaughter had occurred which could not be for- 
 gotten. Swept asunder by a power outside their control, Pro- 
 testants and Catholics stood henceforth in opposite political 
 camps, and it became a fixed article of British policy to govern 
 Ireland by playing upon this antagonism. The flame of the 
 Volunteer spirit never perished, but it dwindled to a spark 
 under the irresistible weight of a manufactured reaction. Dis- 
 
 60
 
 THE UNION 61 
 
 senters and Anglicans united, not to lead the way in securing 
 better conditions for their Catholic fellow-countrymen, not for 
 the interests of Ireland as a whole, but under the ignoble 
 colours of religious fanaticism. Hence that strangely artificial 
 alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the 
 democratic tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; 
 an alliance formed to meet an imaginary danger, and kept in 
 being with the most mischievous results to the social and 
 economic development of Ireland. Since the Protestant 
 minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the 
 English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine of Ascen- 
 dancy, which had showed certain manifest signs of decrepitude 
 under Grattan's Parliament, was reconstructed on a firmer, 
 less corrupt, and more lasting basis. 
 
 The Legislative Union is not a landmark or a turning-point 
 in Irish history. It reproduced " under less assailable forms " 
 the Government which existed prior to 1782. The real crisis, 
 as I have said, came at the end of 1783, when the Volunteers 
 tried, by reforming Parliament, to give Irish Government an 
 Irish character. It is essential to remember now as much 
 as ever before that Ireland has never had a national Parlia- 
 ment. She has never been given a chance of self-expression 
 and self -development. It is useless, though Home Rulers fre- 
 quently give way to the temptation, to advocate Home Rule 
 by arguing from Grattan's Parliament. O'Connell, in the 
 Repeal debate of 1834, devoted hours to praising that Parlia- 
 ment, and had his own argument turned against him with 
 crushing force by the Secretary to the Treasury, who easily 
 proved that it was the most corrupt and absurd body that ever 
 existed. The same game of cross-purposes went on in the 
 Home Rule debates of 1886 and 1893, and reappeared but this 
 year in a debate of the House of Lords (July 4, 1911), when 
 the Roman Catholic Home Ruler, Lord MacDonnell, eulogized 
 Grattan's Parliament in answer to Lord Londonderry, the 
 Protestant Unionist landlord, who painted it in its true colours. 
 Yet Lord Londonderry springs from the class and school of 
 Charlemont, who, by refusing to act as an Irishman, hastened 
 the ruin of the Parliament which Lord Londonderry satirizes, 
 and Lord MacDonnell from the race which was betrayed by that 
 Parliament. The anomaly need not surprise us. It is not
 
 62 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 stranger than the fact that tho Union would never have been 
 carried without Catholic support in Ireland. 
 
 Tho point we have to grasp is that Ireland was a victim to 
 tho crudity and falsity of the political ideas current at the 
 time of tho Union, persistent all over the Empire for long 
 afterwards, and not extinct yet. Between Separation, per- 
 sonified by Tone, and Union, personified by Fitzgibbon, and 
 carried by those milder statesmen, Castlereagh and Pitt, there 
 seemed to bo no alternative. Actually there was and is an 
 alternative : a responsible Irish Parliament and Government 
 united to England by sympathy and interest. 
 
 Tho Parliamentary history of the Union does not much con- 
 cern us. Bribery, whether by titles, offices, or cash, had always 
 been the normal means of securing a Government majority in 
 the Irish House of Commons. Corruption was the only means 
 of carrying the vote for the Union, and the time and labour 
 needed for securing that vote are a measure of the rewards 
 gained by those who formed the majority. Disgusting business 
 as it was, we have to admit that a Parliament which refused to 
 reform itself at the bidding of all that was best and healthiest 
 in Ireland did, on its own account, deserve extinction. The 
 sad thing is that the true Ireland was sacrificed. 
 
 Pitt and Castlereagh, though they plunged their hands deep 
 in the mire to obtain the Union, quite honestly believed in the 
 policy of the Union. They were wrong. They merely re- 
 established the old ascendancy in a form, morally perhaps more 
 defensible, but just as damaging to the interests of Ireland. 
 In addition to absentee landlords, an alien and a largely 
 absentee Church, there was now an absentee Parliament, 
 remote from all possibility of pressure from Irish public 
 opinion, utterly ignorant of Ireland, containing within it, 
 for twenty- nine years, at any rate, representatives of only one 
 creed, and that the creed of the small minority. Pitt had 
 virtually pledged himself to make Catholic Emancipation 
 an immediate consequence of the Union, and his Viceroy, 
 Cornwallis, had thereby obtained the invaluable support of the 
 Catholic hierarchy and of many of the Catholic gentry. The 
 King, half mad at the time, refused to sanction the redemption 
 of the pledge, and Pitt, to his deep dishonour, accepted the 
 insult and dropped the scheme. Fitzgibbonism in its extreme
 
 THE UNION 63 
 
 form had triumphed. It was a repetition of the perfidy over the 
 Treaty of Limerick a century before. Indeed, at every turn 
 of Irish history, until quite recent times, there seems to have 
 been perpetrated some superfluity of folly or turpitude which 
 shut the last outlet for natural improvement. It cannot be 
 held, however, that the refusal of Emancipation for another 
 generation seriously damaged the prospects of the Union as a 
 system of government. After it was granted, the system 
 worked just as badly as before, and in all essentials continues 
 to work just as badly now. Inequalities in the Irish franchise 
 were only an aggravation. In order to cripple Catholic power, 
 Emancipation itself was accompanied in 1829 by an Act which 
 disfranchised at a stroke between seven and eight tenths of the 
 Irish county electorate, nor was it until the latest extension of 
 the United Kingdom franchise, that is, eighty-five years after 
 the Union, that the Irish representation was a true numerical 
 reflection of the Irish democracy. But these were not vital 
 matters. In the Home Rule campaigns of 1886 and 1893, 
 Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was impotent. 
 The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome 
 political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting 
 harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of 
 Irish questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable 
 of comprehending these questions, much less of adjudicating 
 upon them with any semblance of impartiality. 
 
 The Legislative Union was unnatural. The two islands, near 
 as they were to each other, were on different planes of civilization, 
 wealth, and economic development, without a common tradition, 
 a common literature, or a common religion. Each had a tempera- 
 ment and genius of its own, and each needed a different channel 
 of expression. Laws applicable to one island were meaningless 
 or noxious in the other ; taxation applicable to a rich industrial 
 island was inappropriate and oppressive for a poor agricultural 
 island. And upon a system comprising all these incompati- 
 bilities there was grafted the ruinous principle of ascendancy. 
 
 There is nothing inherently strange about the difference 
 between England and Ireland. Artificial land-frontiers often 
 denote much sharper cleavages of sentiment, character, 
 physique, language, history. A sea-frontier sometimes makes 
 a less, sometimes a more, effective line of delimitation. Den-
 
 64 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 mark and Sweden, France and England, are examples. Nor, 
 on the other hand, did the profound differences between Ire- 
 land and England preclude the possibility of their incorpora- 
 tion in a political system under one Crown. We know, by a 
 mass of experience from Federal and other systems, that 
 elements the most diverse in language, religion, wealth, and 
 tradition may bo welded together for common action, provided 
 that the union bo voluntary and the freedom of the separate 
 parts bo preserved. The first conditions of a true union were 
 lacking in the case of Ireland. The arrangement was not 
 voluntary. It was accompanied by gross breach of faith, and 
 it signified enslavement, not liberty. 
 
 A true Union was not even attempted. The Government 
 of Ireland, in effect, and for the most part in form, was still 
 that of a conquered Colonial Dependency. It was no more 
 representative in any practical sense after the Union than 
 before the Union. The popular vote was submerged in a 
 hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded 
 rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own 
 degradation, the Union having been purchased with titles, and 
 titles having been for a century past the price paid for the 
 servility of Anglo-Irish statesmen. But the peerage, in the 
 persons of the twenty-eight representatives sent to West- 
 minster, still remained a powerful nucleus of anti-Irish opinion, 
 infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish prejudice, and 
 often opposing a last barrier to reform when the opposition of 
 the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome. 
 In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were 
 obtained, not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence 
 in Ireland itself. There was still a separate Executive in 
 Ireland, a separate system of local administration, and until 
 1817 a separate financial system, all of them wholly outside 
 Irish control. The only change of constitutional importance 
 was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his 
 autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown 
 Colony, were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a 
 member of the British Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of 
 (Government increased, there grew up that grotesque system 
 of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at the present 
 day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole
 
 THE UNION 65 
 
 patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in 
 English hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways 
 frankly corrupt, it was manipulated in a fashion just as dele- 
 terious to Ireland. Before, as after, the Union there was no 
 public career in Ireland for an Irishman who was in sympathy 
 with the great majority of his countrymen. To win the prizes 
 of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it was 
 not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long 
 time all important offices were held exclusively, and are still 
 held mainly, by Protestants ; but it was absolutely necessary 
 to be a thoroughgoing supporter of the Ascendancy, and in 
 thoroughgoing hostility to Irish public opinion as a whole. 
 In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was preserved after 
 the abolition of the written enactments, and was used for pre- 
 cisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sus- 
 tained attempt " to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. 
 Locker-Lampson puts it, to denationalize her, and to make 
 her own hands the instrument of her humiliation. The Bar 
 was the principal sufferer, because now, as before, it was the 
 principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons multiplied, so that 
 for generations after the Union some of the ablest Irish lawyers 
 were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their 
 own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of com- 
 bating legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of 
 framing and carrying into execution laws which increased the 
 maladies they were intended to allay. 
 
 Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland. 
 In many parts of the world where Ascendancies have existed, 
 or exist, the same methods are employed, and always with a 
 certain measure of success. Irish moral fibre was at least as 
 tough as that of any other nationality in resisting the poison. 
 
 But the results were as calamitous in Ireland as in other 
 countries. No country can progress under such circumstances. 
 The test of government is the condition of the people governed. 
 Judged by this criterion, it is no exaggeration to say that 
 Ireland as a whole went backward for at least seventy years 
 after the Union. Even Protestant North-East Ulster, with its 
 saving custom of tenant-right, its linen industry, and all the 
 special advantages derived from a century of privilege, though 
 it escaped the worst effects of the depression, suffered by 
 
 5
 
 00 
 
 emigration almost as heavily as the rest of Ireland, and built 
 up itn industries with proportionate difficulty. Over the rest 
 of Ireland the main features of the story are continuous from 
 a period long antecedent to the Union. A student of the 
 condition of the Irish peasantry in the eighteenth and in 
 the first three-quarters of the nineteenth centuries can ignore 
 changes in the form or personnel of government. He would 
 scarcely be aware, unless he travelled outside his subject, 
 that Grattan's Parliament ever existed, or that subsequently 
 a long succession of Whig and Tory Ministers, differing pro- 
 foundly in their political principles, had alternately sent over 
 to Ireland Chief Secretaries with theoretically despotic powers 
 for good or evil. These " transient and embarrassed 
 phantoms " came and went, leaving their reputations behind 
 them, and the country they were responsible for in much 
 the same condition. 
 
 It is not my purpose to enter in detail into the history of 
 Ireland in the nineteenth century, but only to note a few 
 salient points which will help us to a comparison with the 
 progress of other parts of the Empire. It is necessary to 
 repeat that the basis upon which the whole economic structure 
 of Ireland rested, the Irish agrarian system, was inconsistent 
 with social peace and an absolute bar to progress. I described 
 in Chapter I. how it came into being and the collateral mischiefs 
 attending it. During the nineteenth century, by accident or 
 design, these mischiefs were greatly aggravated. Until 1815 
 high war prices and the low Catholic franchise stimulated 
 subdivision of holdings, already excessively small, and the 
 growth of population. With the peace came evictions, con- 
 versions into pasture, and consolidation of farms. The dis- 
 f ranchisement of the mass of the peasantry which accompanied 
 Emancipation in 1829 inspired fresh clearances on a large 
 scale and caused unspeakable misery, with further congestion 
 on the worst agricultural land. " Cottier " tenancy, at a 
 competitive rent, and terminable without compensation for the 
 improvements which were made exclusively by the tenant, 
 was general over the greater part of Ireland. Generally 
 it was tcnancy-at-will, with perpetual liability to eviction. 
 Leaseholders, however, were under conditions almost as 
 onerous. The labourer, who was allowed a small plot, which
 
 THE UNION 67 
 
 he paid for in labour, was in the worst plight of all. In 
 addition, burdensome tithes were collected by an alien 
 Church and rents were largely spent abroad. If Irish manu- 
 factures had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet 
 from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian 
 system would have been mitigated. As it was, in one of the 
 richest and most fertile countries in the world the congestion 
 and poverty were appalling. Competition for land meant the 
 struggle for bare life. Rent had no relation to value, but was 
 the price fixed by the frantic bidding of hungry peasants for 
 the bare right to live. The tenant had no interest in im- 
 proving the land, because the penalty for improvement was a 
 higher rent, fixed after another bout of frantic competition. 
 
 " Almost alone amongst mankind," wrote John Stuart Mill,* 
 " the cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either 
 better or worse off by any act of his own. If he were indus- 
 trious or prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain ; if he 
 is lazy or intemperate, it is at his landlord's expense. A 
 situation more devoid of motives to either labour or self- 
 command, imagination itself cannot conceive. The induce- 
 ments of free human beings are taken away, and those of a 
 slave not substituted. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to 
 fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this 
 he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. 
 Rockism and Whiteboyism were the determination of a people, 
 who had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal 
 of the lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived 
 of that for other people's convenience. 
 
 " Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions 
 are formed on the most important problems of human nature 
 and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension 
 imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of 
 energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a 
 peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race ? Of all 
 vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect 
 of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most 
 vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and 
 character to inherent natural differences." 
 
 The " civil war " referred to by Mill as the ultima ratio of 
 * " Principles of Political Economy," vol. ii., p. 392,
 
 68 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the cottier tenant went on intermittently for ninety years of 
 the nineteenth century, as it had gone on during the eighteenth 
 century, and was met by coercive laws of the same general 
 Mamp. Until Mr. Gladstone took the question in hand in 
 1 870, no reformer could get a hearing in Parliament. Bill after 
 Bill, privately introduced, met with contemptuous rejection in 
 favour of some senseless measure of semi-military coercion. 
 There can, I believe, be no doubt that responsible Irish opinion, 
 made effective, would have grappled with the evil firmly and 
 conscientiously. Until the peasant class was driven to the last 
 pitch of desperation, their leaders did not conceive, and, indeed, 
 never wholly succeeded in implanting, the idea of a complete 
 overthrowal of landlordism. The peasant was not unwilling 
 to pay rent. He had, and still has, a deep, instinctive respect 
 for a landed aristocracy, and was ready, and is still ready, to 
 repay good treatment with an intensity of devotion difficult to 
 parallel in other parts of the United Kingdom. In that verit- 
 ably cataclysmic dispersion of the Irish race which ensued upon 
 the great famine, rent continued to be paid at home out of 
 sums remitted from relatives in America. No less than nine- 
 teen millions of money were thus remitted, according to the 
 Emigration Commissioners of 1863, between 1847 and that 
 date. The Roman Catholic Church, as in every part of the 
 world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, 
 on many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately 
 provoked by intolerable suffering. The wealthy and educated 
 landlord class, face to face in a free Parliament with the tenant 
 class, including, be it remembered, the Ulster Protestant 
 tenants, with grievances less acute in degree, but similar in 
 kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway under the 
 stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest. Against 
 the great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal 
 charge. They came into incomes derived from a certain 
 source under ancient laws for which they were not responsible. 
 But, acting through the ascendancy Parliament far away in 
 London, they remained, as an organized class for we must 
 always make allowance for an enlightened and public-spirited 
 minority blind to their own genuine interests and to the 
 demands of humane policy. Their responsibility was transferred 
 to English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or
 
 THE UNION 69 
 
 training, to undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish 
 land question, which had no counterpart in England, through 
 English spectacles. We cannot attribute their failure to lack 
 of information. At every stage there was plenty of unbiassed 
 and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant and 
 Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin 
 of the trouble. Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized 
 what Arthur Young had said in 1772, and what Edward Wake- 
 field, Sharman Crawford, Michael Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and 
 many other writers, thinkers, and politicians had confirmed in 
 the intervening period, and what every fair-minded man 
 admits now to be the truth. Commission after Commission 
 reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they pro- 
 posed were inadequate. The Devon Commission, reporting in 
 
 1845, on the eve of the great famine, condemned the prevalent 
 agrarian tenure, and recommended the statutory establishment 
 of the Ulster custom of tenant right. A very mild and cautious 
 Bill was introduced and dropped. 
 
 Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the 
 rottenness of the economic foundations upon which the 
 welfare of Ireland depended. The population had swollen 
 from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a half millions in 
 
 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law of 
 propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence. 
 What happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, 
 not a serious matter in most countries, but hi Ireland the 
 cause of starvation to three-quarters of a million persons, and 
 the starting-point of that vast exodus which in the last half of 
 the nineteenth century drained Ireland of nearly four million 
 souls. The famine passed, and with it all recollection of the 
 report of the Devon Commission. Hitherto most of the land 
 legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions. Now 
 came the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, whose purpose 
 was to facilitate the buying out of bankrupt Irish land- 
 lords, and whose effect was to perpetuate the old agrarian 
 system under a new set of more mercenary landlords, pursuing 
 the old policy of rack-rents and evictions. In the three years 
 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls. 
 Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to 
 retaliate with the same old defensive policy of outrage. Peace-
 
 70 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 ful agitation was of no use. The Tenant League of North and 
 South, formed in 1852, claimed in vain the simplest of the rights 
 granted under pressure of violence in 1870 and 1881. 
 
 Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for 
 any but secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the 
 century, when a remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, 
 with the general consent of British statesmen and parties. 
 Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of 1829, which was re- 
 commended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a 
 measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized 
 rebellion in Ireland. Tithes, the unjust burden of a century 
 and a half, were only commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years' 
 War revolting in its incidents. Mr. Gladstone admitted, and 
 no one who studies the course of events can deny, that without 
 the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown thereby on 
 the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to 
 carry the Act again overdue by a century for the disestab- 
 lishment of the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid 
 and ineffectual as it was, of 1870. Without the organized 
 lawlessness of the Land League it would have been equally 
 impossible to bring about those more drastic changes in Irish 
 land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested 
 interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 
 1881, and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret 
 conspiracy, extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896. 
 
 Briefly, the effect of these Acts was to establish three prin- 
 ciples : a fair rent, fixed by a judicial tribunal, the Land Com- 
 mission, and revisable every fifteen years ; fixity of tenure as 
 long as the rent is paid ; and free sale of the tenant-right. 
 
 The remedy eventually brought widespread relief, but, from 
 a social and economic standpoint, it was not the right remedy. 
 There is no security for good legislation unless it be framed by 
 those who are to live under it. Constructive thought in Ireland 
 for the solution of her own difficulties and the harmonizing of her 
 own discordant elements had been systematically dammed, or 
 diverted into revolutionary excesses, which, in the traditional 
 spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for more stupid 
 torture. Thus, O'Connell, whose attachment to law was so 
 strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached 
 seemingly irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it,
 
 THE UNION 71 
 
 was tried for sedition. So, too, were dissipated the brilliant 
 talents of the Young Ireland group and the grave statesman- 
 ship of Isaac Butt. Fits intervened of a penitent and bungling 
 philanthropy which has left its traces on nearly all Irish 
 institutions. For example, it was decided in 1830 that the 
 Irish must be educated, and a system was set up which was 
 deliberately designed to anglicize Ireland and extirpate Koman 
 Catholicism. Four years later, in defiance of Irish opinion, a 
 Poor Law pedantically copied from the English model was 
 applied to Ireland. The railway system also was grossly mis- 
 managed. And so with the land. When reform eventually 
 came, the evil had gone too far, and it was beyond the art of 
 the ablest and noblest Englishmen, inheriting English concep- 
 tions of the rights of landed property, to devise any means of 
 placing the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland, 
 inhuman and absurd as they were, on a sound and durable 
 basis. The dual ownership set up by the Land Acts was more 
 humane, but in some respects no less absurd and mischievous. 
 It exasperated the landlord, while, by placing before the tenant 
 the continual temptation of further reductions in rent, it 
 tended to check good cultivation. 
 
 Men came to realize at last that the complete expropriation 
 of the landlords through the State-aided purchase of the land 
 was the only logical resource, and this process, begun tenta- 
 tively and on a very small scale as far back as 1870, under the 
 inspiration of John Bright, and extended under a series of 
 other Acts, was eventually set in motion on a vast scale by the 
 Wyndham Act of 1903. 
 
 I leave a final review of Purchase and of other quite recent 
 remedial legislation, as well as the far more important move- 
 ments for regeneration from within, to later chapters. Mean- 
 while, let us pause for a moment and pronounce upon the 
 political system which made such havoc in Ireland. All this 
 havoc, all this incalculable waste of life, energy, brains, and 
 loyalty, was preventable and unnecessary. Ethics and honour 
 apart, where was the common sense of the legislative Union ? 
 Would it have been possible to design a system better calcu- 
 lated to embitter, impoverish, and demoralize a valuable 
 portion of the Empire ? 
 
 Let us now turn our eyes across the Atlantic, and observe 
 the effects of an Imperial policy founded on the same root idea.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 
 
 IN comparing the history of Canada with the closely allied 
 history of Ireland, we must bear hi mind that in the last half 
 of the eighteenth century the present British North America 
 consisted of three distinct portions : Acadia, or the Maritime 
 Provinces, which we now know as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, 
 New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, colonized originally 
 by a few Frenchmen and later by Scotch and Irish ; Lower 
 Canada, extensively colonized by the French, which we now 
 know as the Province of Quebec ; and Upper Canada, which 
 we now know as Ontario, colonized last of all by Americans 
 under circumstances to be described. 
 
 In 1763, before the repeal of any part of the Penal Code 
 against Irish Roman Catholics, the French Catholic Colony of 
 Lower Canada, with a population of about seventy thousand 
 souls and the two small towns of Quebec and Montreal, passed 
 definitely into British possession under the Treaty of Paris, 
 which brought to a conclusion the Seven Years' War. For- 
 tunately, there was no question, as in Ireland, of expropriating 
 the owners of the soil in favour of State-aided British planters, 
 and hence no question of a Penal Code, even on the moderate 
 scale current in Great Britain at the same period. On the 
 contrary, it became a matter of urgent practical expediency to 
 conciliate the conquered Province in view of the growing dis- 
 affection of the American Colonies bordering it on the South. 
 This disaffection, assuming ominous proportions on the enact- 
 ment of the Stamp Act hi 1765, was itself an indirect result of 
 the conquest of Canada a few years before ; for the claim to 
 tax the Americans for Imperial purposes arose from the 
 enormous expense of the war of conquest and of the subse- 
 quent charges for defence and upkeep. It was forgotten that 
 
 72
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 73 
 
 American volunteers had captured Louisburg in 1745, and had 
 borne a distinguished part in later operations, and that to lay 
 a compulsory tax upon them would banish glorious memories 
 common to America and Britain. Henceforward, conquered 
 French Canada was made a political bulwark against rebel- 
 lious America. The French colonists, a peaceable, primitive 
 folk, as attached to their religion as the Irish, and devoted 
 mainly to agriculture, retained, as long as they desired it, 
 the old French system of law known as the Custom of Paris 
 and the free exercise of their religion. Like the Irish, they 
 were strongly monarchical and strongly conservative in feel- 
 ing, and as impervious to the Republican propaganda emanat- 
 ing from their American neighbours as the Catholic Irish 
 always at heart remained to the revolutionary principles of 
 Wolfe Tone's school. Unmolested in their habits and posses- 
 sions, they philosophically accepted the transference from the 
 Bourbon to the Hanoverian dynasty, and became an indis- 
 pensable source of strength to George III. when that monarch 
 was using his German troops to coerce his American subjects 
 and his British troops to overawe the Ulster Volunteers. 
 
 In 1774, immediately before the outbreak of a war against 
 which Ireland was protesting, and in which, with the soundest 
 justification, the Irish-Americans, Catholic and Protestant, 
 took such a prominent part against the British arms, the 
 Quebec Act was passed giving formal statutory sanction to 
 the Catholic religion, and setting up a nominated legislative 
 Council, whose members were subject to no religious test. 
 In Ireland it was not till six years later, and, as we have seen, 
 by means of precisely the same pressure British fear of 
 America that the Irish Protestant Volunteers obtained the 
 abolition of the test for Dissenters, while Catholics in Ireland 
 were still little more than outlaws, and had to wait for nearly 
 sixty years for complete emancipation. The result of the 
 Quebec Act, together with the sympathetic administration of 
 that great Irishman, Sir Guy Carleton, was the firm allegiance 
 of the French Province in spite of an exceedingly formidable 
 invasion, during the whole of the American War, and even 
 after the intervention of European France. It is part of the 
 dramatic irony of these occurrences that some of the invading 
 army was composed of Morgan's Irish-American riflemen, and
 
 74 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 that one of the two joint leaders of the invasion was the Irish- 
 American, General Richard Montgomery, who fell at the un- 
 successful assault of Quebec on December 31, 1775. 
 
 In spite of Burke's noble appeal in the House of Commons, 
 toleration in the abstract had nothing to do with the treat- 
 ment of the French Catholics. British Catholics in the 
 neighbouring Prince Edward Island were denied all civil rights 
 in 1 770, and only gained them in 1 830. In England, the Quebec 
 Act with difficulty survived a storm of indignation, in which 
 even Chatham joined. The small minority of British settled 
 in Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the 
 American Congress itself in 1774 committed the irreparable 
 blunder of making the establishment of the Roman Catholic 
 religion in Canada one of its formally published grievances 
 against Great Britain. When war broke out, and the magni- 
 tude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce the 
 Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the 
 Canadians very naturally abode by their first impressions. 
 
 The peace of 1783 and the final recognition of American 
 Independence led to results of far-reaching importance for the 
 further development of the British Empire. Out of the loss 
 of the American Colonies came the foundation of Australia 
 and of British Canada. Before the war it had been the custom 
 to send convicts from the United Kingdom to penal settle- 
 ments in the American Colonies. The United States stopped 
 this traffic. Pitt's Government decided, after several years of 
 doubt and delay, to divert the stream of convicts to the newly 
 acquired and still unpopulated territory of New South Wales, 
 made known by the voyages of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph 
 Banks. At the same period a very different class of men, seek- 
 ing a new home, were thrown upon the charity of the British 
 Government. These were the " United Empire Loyalists," 
 as they styled themselves, some 40,000 Americans, with a 
 sprinkling of Irishmen among them, such as Luke Carscallion, 
 Peter Daly, Willet Casey, and John Canniff,* who had fought 
 on the Royalist side throughout the war, and at the end of it 
 found their fortunes ruined and themselves the objects of keen 
 resentment. Pitt, with a " total lack of Imperial imagination," 
 
 " The Irishman in Canada " (N. F. Davin), a book to which the author 
 is indebted for much information of the same character,
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 75 
 
 as Mr. Holland Rose puts it,* does not seem to have considered 
 the plan of colonizing Australia with a part of these men, 433 
 of whom were reported to be living in destitution in London 
 three years after the war. No more alacrity was shown in 
 relieving the distress of those still in America. In 1788, how- 
 ever, a million and a quarter pounds were voted by Parliament 
 for relief, and large grants of land were made in Canada, 
 whither most of the Loyalists had already begun to emigrate. 
 Some went to the Maritime Provinces, notably to the region 
 now known as New Brunswick ; a few went to the towns of the 
 Quebec Province, for the country lands on the lower reaches 
 of the St. Lawrence were already monopolized by the French 
 " habitants "; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to the upper 
 reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes 
 Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the 
 Province of Ontario, and to what then became known as 
 Upper Canada. 
 
 From this moment the three Canadas gain sharp definition. 
 To the west Upper Canada, exclusively American or, as we 
 must now say, British in character ; next to the east, and 
 cutting off its neighbour from the sea, the ancient Province of 
 Lower Canada, predominantly French, with a minority of 
 British traders in the two towns Quebec and Montreal ; last 
 of all the Maritime Provinces, small communities with an 
 almost independent history of their own, although, like Upper 
 and Lower Canada, they eventually presented a problem 
 similar fundamentally to the Irish problem on the other side 
 of the Atlantic. Prince Edward Island is the closest parallel, 
 for, besides the Catholic disabilities of 1770, in 1767 the whole 
 of its land had been granted away by ballot in a single day 
 to a handful of absentee English proprietors, who sublet to 
 occupiers without security of tenure, with the result that a 
 land question similar to that of Ireland arose, which inflamed 
 society and retarded the development of the island for a whole 
 century. Ultimately, moreover, statesmen were driven to an 
 even more drastic solution compulsory and universal State- 
 aided land purchase. f Before the period we have now reached, 
 
 * " William Pitt and the National Eevival." 
 
 f Canadian Archives, 1905 ; " History of Prince Edward Island," D. Camp- 
 bell; "History of Canada," C. D. G. Eoberts. In 1875, after a long period 
 of agitation and discontent, the Land Purchase Act was passed, and the
 
 78 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which was carved out 
 of it, had been given rude systems of representative Govern- 
 ment, and New Brunswick, also at one time a part of Nova 
 Scotia, received a Constitution in 1784. 
 
 The great question after the American War was how to 
 govern the two contiguous Provinces of Upper and Lower 
 Canada, the one newly settled by men of British race and 
 Protestant faith, the other also under the British flag, but 
 overwhelmingly French and Catholic, both, in the critical half- 
 century to come, to be reinforced by immigrants from the Old 
 World, and to a large extent from misgoverned Ireland. But 
 let the reader once and for all grasp this point, that, once out 
 of Ireland, there ceases, not immediately, but in course of 
 time, to be any racial or political distinction between the 
 different classes of Irishmen, whose antagonism at home, 
 artificially provoked and fomented by the bad form of 
 government under which they lived, so often made Ireland 
 itself a very hell on earth. I want to dwell on this point in 
 order to avoid confusion when I speak of the bi-racial condi- 
 tions of Lower Canada and Ireland respectively. 
 
 To return to the question of Government. The American 
 Colonies were lost. Here in Canada was an opportunity for a 
 new Imperial policy, better calculated to retain the affections 
 of the colonists. Three distinct problems were involved : 
 
 1. Was French or Lower Canada, with its small minority of 
 British, to be given representative Government at all ? 
 
 2. If so, was it to be left as a separate unit, or was it to be 
 amalgamated in a Union with its neighbour, Upper Canada ? 
 
 3. Whichever course was taken, what was to be the relation 
 between the Home Government and Canada ? 
 
 All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and 
 the parallel in each case is interesting. In Canada they were 
 determined for the space of half a century by the Constitu- 
 tional Act of 1791, passed at the period when Grattan's unre- 
 formed Parliament was hastening to its fall, and Wolfe Tone 
 was founding his Society of United Irishmen. Let us take in 
 turn the three questions posed above. 
 
 Dominion Government asked Mr. Hugh Childers to adjudicate on the land- 
 Hale expressly on the ground that he had been associated with the Irish 
 Laiul Act of 1870 (" Lifo of Mr. Childers," by Lieut.-Col. Spencer Childers, 
 vol. i., p. 232).
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 77 
 
 1. The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a 
 corresponding school in England, were strong for an undis- 
 guised British ascendancy, without any recognition of the 
 French. They urged, what was true, that the French were 
 unaccustomed to representative government, and implied, 
 what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and 
 ought not to, be educated to it. If there was to be an Assembly 
 at all, it should, they claimed, be wholly British and Pro- 
 testant, or, in the alternative, the Protestant minority only 
 should be represented at Westminster. In other words, they 
 wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for the post- 
 Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning 
 to prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland. We 
 are not surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman 
 Burke, in whom horror of the French Revolution had destroyed 
 the last particle of Liberalism. If Pitt lacked " Imperial 
 imagination," he knew more than most of his contemporaries 
 about the elementary principles of governing white men. It 
 was only a few years before that he had urged upon his Irish 
 Viceroy, Rutland, a reform of the Irish Parliament which 
 might have united the races and averted all the disasters to 
 come, and in this very year (1791) he was pressing forward 
 the Catholic franchise in Ireland. The French in Canada 
 must, he said, be represented in a popular Assembly equally 
 with the British, and on the broadest possible franchise, and 
 they were. 
 
 2. The next question was that of the union or separation of 
 Upper and Lower Canada. Here, and from the same under- 
 lying motive, the British minority in Lower Canada were for 
 the Union, partly on commercial grounds, but mainly as a 
 step in the direction of overcoming French influence. Upper 
 Canada, wholly British, was, on the whole, neutral. Pitt, on 
 high principle, again took correct ground. He did not, indeed, 
 foresee that separation, for geographical reasons, would cause 
 certain inconveniences ; but he did understand and experi- 
 ence in both Provinces ultimately proved him right that it 
 was absolutely hopeless to try and avert social and racial dis- 
 cord by artificially swamping the French element. He de- 
 clared, then, for the separation of the two Canadas into two 
 distinct Provinces. Note the beginnings of another, though a
 
 78 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 distant, analogy with the relations of Ireland and Great 
 Britain, distant because the French at this time largely out- 
 numbered the British of both Provinces, and hi after-years 
 maintained something very near a numerical equality. But 
 the same underlying principle was involved. Pitt, in the 
 Legislative Union of Ireland and Great Britain nine years 
 later, constructed without geographical necessity, indeed, in 
 defiance of geography and humanity, the very system which, 
 in a form by comparison almost innocuous, he had condemned 
 for Canada ; but not, we must hi fairness remember, before 
 doing his part at an earlier date to arrive at a solution which, 
 given a fair chance, would have rendered the Union of Ireland 
 and England unnecessary. 
 
 3. So far, good. But there still remained a further ques- 
 tion far transcending the other in importance What was to 
 be the relation between the Home Government and the new 
 Colonies ? Here all British intellects, that of Fox alone ex- 
 cepted, were as much at a loss as ever. One simple deduction 
 was made from what had happened in America, namely, that 
 the new Colonies must not be forced to contribute to Imperial 
 funds by taxes levied from London. That claim had already 
 been abandoned in 1778 by the Colonial Tax Repeal Act, 
 which nevertheless expressly reserved the King's right to levy 
 " such duties as it may be expedient to impose for the regula- 
 tion of commerce," the sum so raised to be retained for the 
 use of the Colony. No one made the more comprehensive 
 deduction, even in the case of wholly British Upper Canada, 
 that Colonial affairs should be controlled by Colonial opinion, 
 constitutionally ascertained, and that the British Governor 
 should act primarily through advisers chosen by the majority 
 of the people under his rule. We must bear in mind that, had 
 Grattan's Parliament been reformed, and the warring races in 
 Ireland been brought into harmony, it would still have had 
 to pass through the crucial phase of establishing its right to 
 choose Ministers by whose advice the Lord-Lieutenant should 
 be guided, that is, if it were to become a true Home Rule 
 Parliament of the kind we aim at to-day. 
 
 From the date of the Constitutional Act passed for Canada 
 in 1791, it took fifty-six troubled years and an armed rebellion 
 in each Province to establish the principle of what we call
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 79 
 
 " responsible Government " for Canada, and, through Canada, 
 for the rest of the white Colonies of the Empire. During these 
 fifty-six years, which correspond in Irish history to a period 
 dating from the middle of Grattan's Parliament down to the 
 great Famine, ascendancies, with the symptoms of disease 
 which always attended ascendancies, grew up in Canada, as 
 they had in Ireland, in spite of conditions which were far more 
 favourable in Canada to healthy political growth. Canada 
 started with this great advantage over Ireland, that instead 
 of a corrupt parody of a Parliament, each of her Provinces, 
 under the Constitutional Act of 1791, had a real popular 
 Assembly, elected without regard to race or religion. It was 
 the Upper House or Legislative Council, as it was called, that 
 interposed the first obstacle to the free working of popular 
 institutions. In both Provinces this Council was nominated 
 by the Governor, and could be used, and was naturally used, 
 to represent minority interests and obstruct the popular 
 assembly. Fox had correctly prophesied that it would soon 
 come " to inspire hatred and contempt." But he did not 
 mean that such a chamber was in itself an insuperable bar to 
 harmony. Nominated or hereditary second chambers are not 
 necessarily inconsistent with popular government, provided 
 that the Executive Government itself possesses the confidence 
 of the representative Assembly. Under that lever, obstruc- 
 tion eventually gives way. But this idea of a tie of confi- 
 dence between the Governors and the governed was exactly 
 what was lacking. 
 
 The Executive Council in each Province was also chosen by 
 the British Governor or Lieutenant-Governor, generally a 
 military man, from persons representing either his own purely 
 British policy or the ideas of a privileged colonial minority, 
 and without regard to the wishes or opinions of the Colonial 
 Assembly, just as the Executive officers in Ireland, both before 
 and after the Union, were chosen out of corresponding elements 
 by the Lord-Lieutenant or Chief Secretary, acting under the 
 orders of the British Government, and without any regard to 
 the wishes or opinions of the majority of Irishmen. Behind 
 all, in remote Downing Street stood the British Government, 
 in the shape of the Colonial Office for Canada and the Irish 
 Office for Ireland, both working in dense ignorance of the real
 
 80 THK FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 needs of the countries for which they were responsible, and 
 permeated with prejudice and pedantry. To complete the 
 parallel, there was now a foreign Power in the close neighbour- 
 hood of each dependency, the United States in the case of 
 Canada, France in the case of Ireland, both of them Republican 
 Powers, and both able and willing to take advantage of dis- 
 affection in the dependencies in order to further a quarrel with 
 the Mother Country. We have seen the results in Ireland. 
 Let us now observe the results in Canada, taking especial care 
 to notice that an ascendancy Government gives rise to the 
 same type of evil in a uni-racial as in a bi-racial community. 
 
 Let us glance first at what happened in Upper Canada, 
 which was uni-racial, that is, composed of settlers from the 
 United Kingdom (including Ireland) and America. Here the 
 original settlers, the " United Empire Loyalists " from 
 America, formed from the first, and maintained for half a 
 century, an ascendancy of wealth and religion over the in- 
 coming settlers, who soon constituted the majority of the 
 population. As in Ireland, though in a degree small by 
 comparison, there was a land question and a religious question, 
 closely related to one another. Happily, it was not a case 
 of robbery, but of simple monopoly. Excessively large grants 
 of land, nine-tenths of which remained uncultivated, were 
 obtained by the original settlers, most of whom were Episco- 
 palian in faith, and, under the Act of 1791, further tracts of 
 enormous extent, which for the most part lay waste and idle, 
 were set apart in each township, under the name of " Clergy 
 Reserves " for the Episcopalian Church. Since the majority of 
 the incoming settlers were Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, 
 or Roman Catholics, many of them from the Protestant and 
 Catholic parts of Ireland, some from America, some even from 
 Germany, these conditions caused intense irritation, checking 
 both the development of the country and the growth of 
 solid character among the colonists. Absentee ownership was 
 a grave economic evil, though happily it was not complicated 
 and embittered by a vicious system of tenure. Education 
 suffered severely through the diversion of the income from 
 public lands to private purposes. 
 
 The ascendancy was maintained on lines familiar in Ireland 
 through the mutual dependence of the colonial minority and
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 81 
 
 the Home Government acting through its Governor. A few 
 leading Episcopalian families from among the United Empire 
 Loyalists, installed at Toronto, with the support of a succession 
 of High Tory Lieutenant-Governors, monopolized the Execu- 
 tive Council, the Legislative Council, the Bench, the Bar, and 
 all offices of profit, denying a Canadian career to the vast 
 majority of Upper Canadians, just as Irishmen were excluded 
 from an Irish career. For a long time the Assembly itself, 
 which retained its original Constitution long after the influx 
 of immigrants had rendered necessary its enlargement on a 
 new electoral basis, was a subject of monopoly also. Even 
 when enlarged in 1821 it was helpless against the nominated 
 Council and Executive, backed by Downing Street. The 
 oligarchy came to be known by the name of the " family 
 compact," and, as the reader will observe, it bore a close 
 resemblance in form to the " undertaker " system in Ireland 
 before the Union, and to the monopoly of patronage obtained 
 by certain families, notably the Beresfords. 
 
 While the Colony was still small, the system worked tolerably 
 well ; but from the second decade of the nineteenth century 
 onwards, when the population grew from 150,000 to 250,000 
 in 1832, and to 500,000 a few years later, and the Episcopalians 
 sank into a numerical minority as low as a quarter, troubles of 
 the Irish type became proportionately acute. The Colony was 
 in reality perfectly content with its position under the Crown, 
 and in the war with America in 1812 all classes and creeds 
 united to repel invasion with enthusiasm. One of the promi- 
 nent leaders was an Irishman, James Fitzgibbon, and a poor 
 Irish private, James O'Hara, won fame by refusing to sur- 
 render at the capture of Toronto Fort. As usual, however, a 
 fictitious standard of "loyalty," which, in fact, meant privi- 
 lege, was set up, obscuring those questions of good govern- 
 ment which were the only real matters at issue in Canada, as 
 in Ireland. There were Republican immigrants of many 
 denominations from America, Radicals of Cobbett's school 
 from England and Scotland, tenants of a democratic turn from 
 Ulster, and a growing stream of Catholic cottiers flying from the 
 " clearances " and tithe war in other Irish Provinces. All these 
 classes of men made excellent settlers, and only wanted fair 
 and equal treatment to make them perfectly peaceable citizens. 
 
 6
 
 82 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 To the official oligarchy, however, even their moderate leaders 
 came to be viewed as rebels, and were often subjected to im- 
 prisonment or to banishment. 
 
 Among others William Gourlay, a Scotsman, Stephen 
 Willcocks and Francis Collins, Irishmen, all three perfectly re- 
 spectable reformers, suffered in this way. Bidwell, the great 
 Robert Baldwin, and other good men were rendered powerless 
 for good. As invariably happens in any part of the world 
 where a course is pursued which estranges moderate men and 
 embitters extreme men, agitators came to the front lacking 
 that self-control and sense of responsibility which the sobering 
 education of office alone can give, and generally ruining them- 
 selves while they benefit humanity at large. Chief of these 
 was W. L. Mackenzie, a Presbyterian Scot from Dundee. All 
 this man really wanted was what exists to-day as a matter of 
 course in all self-governing countries responsible government. 
 He even conceived that great idea of the Confederation of 
 British North America, which came to birth in 1867. Thwarted 
 in his attacks on the oligarchy, he degenerated into violent 
 courses, and ultimately organized, or rather was provoked into 
 organizing, the rebellion of 1837. The grievances which led 
 to this outbreak were genuine and severe, and were all in course 
 of time admitted and redressed. One, the powerlessness of 
 the Assembly, owing to the control by the Executive of annual 
 sums sufficient to pay the official expenses of Government, 
 corresponded to a pre-Union Irish grievance, and was remedied 
 by an Act of 1831. Most of the other grievances were incur- 
 able by constitutional effort. They may be found summarized 
 in the " Seventh Report of Grievances," a temperate and 
 truthful document drawn up by a Committee of the Assembly 
 in 1 835. The huge unsettled Clergy Reserves and Crown Lands 
 were the worst concrete abuse, and matters had just then been 
 aggravated by the sudden establishment of scores of sinecure 
 rectories. Jobbery, maladministration, and the dependence of 
 the judges on the Executive were other complaints ; but the 
 main assault was made quite rightly on the form of the Colonial 
 Government, which rendered peaceful reform of any abuse as 
 impossible as in Ireland, and the cardinal claim was that the 
 Executive should act, not under the dictation of Downing 
 Street, of an irresponsible Governor, or of a narrow colonial
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 83 
 
 oligarchy, but in accordance with popular opinion. Mac- 
 kenzie's rebellion of 1837 was a no more formidable affair than 
 the similar efforts in Ireland made under incomparably greater 
 provocation by Emmett in 1803 and Smith O'Brien in 1848, 
 and was as easily suppressed ; but, unlike the Irish outbreaks, 
 and in conjunction with a revolt arising in the same year and 
 from similar causes in the adjoining Province of Lower Canada, 
 it led to a complete change of system. 
 
 In Lower Canada the same preposterous system of govern- 
 ment was aggravated by the presence of the two races, French 
 and English. Yet there was nothing inherently dangerous or 
 unwholesome about this situation. The French, like the 
 Catholics in Ireland, never showed the smallest tendency 
 towards religious intolerance, nor were they less loyal at heart 
 than the Radicals of Upper Canada or the Tories of either 
 Province. They took the same energetic part in repelling the 
 American invasion of 1812, and produced at least one remark- 
 able leader hi the person of Colonel Salaberry, who commanded 
 the French-Canadian Voltigeurs. Like their co-religionists in 
 Ireland, they were temperamentally averse to Republicanism 
 in any shape, whether on the American model over the border 
 or on the model of revolutionary France, where Republicanism 
 since 1793 was anti-Catholic and the result of miseries and 
 oppressions as bad as those in Ireland ; whence, moreover, 
 many priests and nobles fled from persecution to Lower Canada. 
 As in eighteenth-century Ireland, we find that the Roman 
 Catholic clergy, the seigneurs or aristocrats, and the habitants 
 or peasants, were of a Conservative cast, throwing their weight, 
 often even against their own interests, into the scale of the 
 established Government, while the lawyers and journalists 
 alone produced determined agitators. The racial cleavage, 
 moreover, as in Ireland, was artificially accentuated by the 
 political system. There was in reality a strong community of 
 interest between the British lower class and the French lower 
 class against the tyranny of an official clique, and to the end 
 a substantial number of Englishmen worked with the French 
 for reform ; but with the failure of their efforts came that 
 inevitable tightening of the bonds of race, even against in- 
 terest, which we have seen operating with such lamentable 
 effect in Ireland. And, as in Ireland, we find the best instincts
 
 84 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of the people withered and perverted into rebellion by " Fitz- 
 gibbonism," the policy of distrust and coercion. 
 
 The British official ascendancy, supreme from the first, 
 became extraordinarily rigid. The Executive Council and 
 Legislative Council were almost entirely British, the Assembly 
 overwhelmingly French. There were no regular heads of 
 departments, so that the Governor had no skilled advice, much 
 less responsible advice. The Councils blocked all legislation 
 they disliked, and for more than forty years, by means of 
 unrestricted control over a large part of the provincial revenues, 
 were able to defy the Assembly. It will be observed that, 
 although Ireland never had anything worth calling an Assembly, 
 her structure both before and after the Union was essentially 
 the same, in that Irish public opinion, whether voiced by the 
 Volunteers against the unreformed Parliament or after the 
 Union by the Nationalist party at Westminster, was powerless. 
 The existence of a popular Assembly in Canada only made the 
 anomalies more obvious. 
 
 There were, of course, marked divergencies of character and 
 less marked divergencies of interest between the French 
 majority and the British minority in Canada. The French, 
 by comparison, were a backward and conservative race, less 
 well educated and less progressive and energetic both in agri- 
 culture and commerce than the British. On the other hand, 
 subsequent experience showed that, under free constitutional 
 government, British intelligence, wealth, and energy would, 
 here as elsewhere, have preserved their full legitimate influence. 
 Under a system which throttled French ideas and aspirations, 
 and treated the most harmless popular movements as treason- 
 able machinations, deadlock and anarchy were in the long run 
 inevitable. 
 
 The popular demands were much the same as those in 
 Upper Canada : control of the purse, the independence of the 
 judges, an elective Legislative Council, and a curtailment of 
 the arbitrary powers and privileges of the Executive, which 
 led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance. As in 
 Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it 
 assumed a somewhat different form, was the disposal of the 
 public lands. Here, too, there were extensive and undeveloped 
 Clergy Reserves for the Episcopalian Church, as well as free
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 85 
 
 grants on a large scale to speculators. The estates of the Jesuit 
 Order had been confiscated, so that disputes about their disposal 
 were tinged with religious bitterness. But most of the friction 
 over the land question came from the operations of a chartered 
 land company, which, under the protection of the Government, 
 and with financial and political support from England, dealt 
 with the unsettled land in a manner very unfair and often 
 corrupt, and promoted here, as in Upper Canada and Ireland, 
 absentee ownership. 
 
 The popular agitation ran the same course as in Upper 
 Canada, reached its crisis at the same moment, threw into 
 prominence the same types of men, moderate and extreme, and 
 produced the same waste of good human material and distor- 
 tion of human character, both in the ascendant and the subject 
 classes. As Sir John Cockburn tells us in his " Political Annals 
 of Canada " (p. 177), some of the most incendiary speakers 
 and writers (in 1836) were " most able and worthy men, who 
 in the subsequent days of tranquillity occupied most prominent 
 and distinguished positions in the public service, revered as 
 loyal, true, and able statesmen by all classes." The popular 
 movement was by no means wholly French. A Scot, John 
 Neilson ; an Englishman, Wilfred Nelson ; and an Irish jour- 
 nalist, Dr. O'Callaghan, were prominent members of a kind 
 of Radical party ; but the ablest and most influential among 
 the agitators, and in every respect more admirable than Mac- 
 kenzie, was the Frenchman, Louis Papineau, who first became 
 Speaker of the Assembly in 1817, and retained that high 
 position until the verge of the rebellion of 1837. By no means 
 devoid of superficial faults, but eloquent, honest, accomplished 
 and adored by his compatriots, here was a man who, if he had 
 been given reasonable scope for his talents, and steadied by 
 official responsibility, would have been a tower of strength to 
 the Colony and the British connection. He corresponds in 
 position and aims, and to a certain extent in character and 
 gifts, to his great Irish contemporary, O'Connell. But O'Connell 
 was too conservative to produce great results. Papineau, 
 dashing himself in vain for twenty years against the entrenched 
 camp of the ascendancy, finally degenerated, like Mackenzie, 
 into a commonplace rebel. 
 
 The phases through which the agitation passed before it
 
 86 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 reached this disastrous point need only a brief review. Naturally 
 enough, owing to the bi-racial conditions, friction had arisen 
 earlier in Lower than in Upper Canada, yet the first recognition 
 of the flagrant defects of the Constitution was not made till 
 1828, when a Committee of the British House of Commons 
 published a Report which, though its recommendations were 
 mild and inadequate, was in effect a censure of the whole 
 political system of the Province and an admission of the 
 justice of the agitation. There was no result for four years, 
 while matters went from bad to worse in the Colony. At last, 
 in 1832, under an Act similar to that passed for Upper Canada, 
 all the provincial revenues were placed under the control of 
 the Assembly in return for the voting of a fixed Civil List. 
 This well-meant half-measure made matters worse, because it 
 left the Assembly just as powerless as before over the details 
 of legislation and administration, while giving it the power to 
 paralyze the Government by refusing all, instead of only part, 
 of the supplies. This it proceeded to do, and in the next five 
 years large deficits were piled up, and the Colony became 
 insolvent. 
 
 Meanwhile, in February, 1834, a year before the publication 
 of the " Seventh Report of Grievances " in Upper Canada, and 
 three months before O'Connell's celebrated motion in the 
 House of Commons for the Repeal of the Union between 
 England and Ireland, the Assembly of Lower Canada, at 
 Papineau's instance, passed the equally celebrated " Ninety- 
 two Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of 
 O'Connell's speech, this historic document nevertheless was 
 as true in all really essential respects as Mackenzie's manifesto 
 and as O'Connell's tremendous indictment of the system of 
 Government in Ireland. All three men, O'Connell with far 
 the most justification, demanded the same thing, good govern- 
 ment for their respective countries under a responsible Parlia- 
 ment and Ministry. They all occasionally used wild language, 
 O'Connell the least wild. O'Connell, who nine years later 
 deliberately quenched a popular revolt he could have headed, 
 failed in his aim as completely as Tone, Emmett, and Smith 
 O'Brien, who pressed their efforts to the point of violence. 
 Mackenzie and Papineau, who took to arms, succeeded in their 
 aim.
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 87 
 
 The crisis in Lower Canada was precipitated, and, indeed, 
 provoked, by a challenge thrown out in March, 1837, from the 
 British House of Commons, where, at Lord John Russell's 
 instance, the Ten Resolutions were agreed to, which amounted 
 in effect to a denial of all the colonial claims and a declaration 
 of war upon those who made them. Papineau had to eat his 
 words or make them good, and he chose the latter course. 
 His insurrection was arranged in concert with that of the 
 Upper Province, broke out simultaneously in the whiter of 
 1837, and was extinguished with little difficulty. The men 
 who made it suffered. Canada and the Empire profited. 
 Both Papineau and Mackenzie, following the precedent of 
 Wolfe Tone with France, endeavoured with little success to 
 engage American sympathy and the aid of her army, though 
 Canada had as little desire for American rule as Ireland had 
 for French rule. 
 
 Let us remark, as an interesting fact for those who imagine 
 that Irishmen are always instinctively on the side of turbu- 
 lence and disorder, that the Irish immigrants who poured into 
 Canada at the average annual rate of 20,000 in the years 
 terrible years in Ireland preceding the rebellions,* acted much 
 as we might expect. In the Lower Province, following the lead 
 of the French Catholic hierarchy, they declared in November, 
 1837, against Papineau's party, and thus strengthened the 
 hands of the Government when the crisis approached. f In the 
 Upper Province Catholics were strongly on the side of reform, 
 but took no part in the rebellion. Orangemen in both Prov- 
 inces, as we might guess, sided as strongly with the ascendancy 
 parties, but colonial air seems to have taken some of the theo- 
 logical venom out of Orangeism. If Charles Buller is to be 
 trusted, some Catholics joined the societies in Upper Canada, 
 which were more Tory than religious, and the healths of 
 William of Orange and the Catholic Bishop Macdonnell were 
 drunk in impartial amity. f 
 
 In the meantime, three of the four outlying Provinces of 
 
 * Canadian Archives, 1900. Note B. Emigration (1831-1834). Irish immi- 
 grants in 1829, 9,614 ; in 1830, 18,300 ; in 1831, 34,155 ; in 1832, 28,024 ; in 
 1833, 12,013 ; in 1834, 19,206 : about double the immigration of English and 
 Scottish together in the same period. 
 
 t " Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 96 et seq. 
 
 | " Durham Eeport," p. 130.
 
 88 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 North America Nova Scotia, Now Brunswick, and Prince 
 Edward Island whoro the same form of Constitution pre- 
 vailed as in Upper and Lower Canada, had been passing 
 through a similar phase of rnisgovernment and agitation 
 during the previous thirty years. Each suffered under a little 
 monopolist ascendancy, called by the same name, "the family 
 compact," and sustained, against the prevailing sentiment 
 and interest, by the British Governor, and in each had arisen, 
 or was arising, the same loud demand for responsible govern- 
 ment. Samuel Wilmot in New Brunswick, Joseph Howe in 
 Nova Scotia, were the best-known spokesmen. There was no 
 violence, but a growing dislocation. In five Provinces of 
 North America, therefore, the Colonial Government had broken 
 clo\\Ti or was tottering, and from exactly the same cause as in 
 Ireland, though under provocation infinitely less grave. For 
 the moment, however, attention was concentrated upon the 
 Canadas, where, as a result of the rebellion, the Constitution 
 of Lower Canada was suspended early in 1838. In the summer 
 of 1838 Lord Durham, the Radical peer, was sent out by Mel- 
 bourne's Ministry as Governor-General, with provisionally 
 despotic powers, and with instructions to advise upon a new 
 form of government. 
 
 Before we come to Durham's proposals, let us pause and 
 examine the state of home opinion on the Irish and Colonial 
 questions. The people of Great Britain at large had no opinion 
 at all. They were ignorant both of Canada and Ireland, and 
 had been engaged, and, indeed, were still engaged, in a political 
 struggle of their own which absorbed all their energies. The 
 Chartist movement in 1838 was assuming grave proportions. 
 The Reform, won in 1832 under the menace of revolution and 
 in the midst of shocking disorders, was in reality a first step 
 toward the domestic Home Rule that Ireland and the five 
 Provinces of North America were clamouring for. Tory states- 
 men were quite alive to this political fact, and condemned all 
 the political movements, British, Irish, and Colonial, indis- 
 criminately and on the same broad anti-democratic grounds. 
 The Duke of Wellington, who was not a friend of the Reform 
 Act, and had only adopted Catholic Emancipation in order to 
 avoid civil war in Ireland, speaking about Canada in the House 
 of Lords on January 18, 1838, coupled together the United
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 89 
 
 States, British North America, and Ireland as dismal examples 
 of the folly of concession to popular demands. Pointing to 
 the results of the Canada Act of 1831, to which I have already 
 alluded, and which gave the Assemblies control of the provincial 
 revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the tithe war barely 
 at an end in Ireland, he said : " Let noble lords learn from 
 Canada and our other dominions in North America what it is 
 to hold forth what are called popular rights, but which are 
 not popular rights here or elsewhere, and what occasion is 
 given thereby to perpetuate a system of agitation which ends 
 in insurrection and rebellion." 
 
 The Whig statesmen who, if we except Peel's short Adminis- 
 tration of 1834-35, were in power from 1830 to 1841, though 
 by no means democratic men, were clear enough about Reform 
 for Great Britain, but nearly as ignorant and quite as wrong 
 about Ireland and Canada as the Tories. The only prominent 
 Parliamentarian who, as after events proved, correctly diag- 
 nosed and prescribed for the disease in both countries was 
 O'Connell. Not fully alive to the Irish analogy, but correct 
 from first to last about Canada, was a small group of indepen- 
 dent Radicals, of whom Roebuck, Hume, Grote, Molesworth, 
 and Leader were the principal representatives. After the in- 
 surrections in Canada came John Stuart Mill, Edward Gibbon 
 Wakefield, Charles Buller, and with them Lord Durham him- 
 self. 
 
 No one can understand either Irish or Colonial history with- 
 out reading the debates of this period in the Lords and Com- 
 mons on Canada and Ireland. Alternating with one another 
 with monotonous regularity, they nevertheless leave an im- 
 pression of an extraordinary lack of earnestness, sympathy, 
 and knowledge, and an extraordinary degree of prejudice and 
 of bigotry in the Parliament to whose care for better or worse 
 the welfare of nearly ten millions of British citizens outside 
 Great Britain was entrusted. Save for an occasional full-dress 
 debate at some peculiarly critical juncture, the debates were 
 ill-attended. The prevailing sentiment seems to have been 
 that Ireland and Canada, leavened by a few respectable 
 " loyalists " and officials, on the whole, were two exceedingly 
 mutinous and embarrassing possessions, which, nevertheless, 
 it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon into
 
 90 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 obedience. Both dependencies were assumed to be equally 
 expensive, though, in fact, Ireland, as we know now, was 
 showing a handsome profit at the time, whereas Canada was 
 costing a quarter of a million a year. For the rest, the pride of 
 power tempered a sort of fatalistic apathy. In the case of 
 Ireland the element of pure selfishness was stronger, because 
 the immense vested interests, lay and clerical, in Irish land 
 were strongly represented. The proximity of Ireland, too, 
 rendered coercion more obvious and easy. Otherwise, her case 
 was the same as that of Canada. " The Canadas are en- 
 deavouring to escape from us, America has escaped us, but 
 Ireland shall not escape us," said an English member to 
 O'Connell just before the Repeal debate of 1834. Such was the 
 current view. 
 
 Yet, as in the case of Ireland and of the lost American 
 Colonies, the materials for knowledge of Canada were con- 
 siderable. Petitions poured hi ; Committees and Commissions 
 were appointed, and made reports which were consigned to 
 oblivion. Roebuck, one of the small Radical group, was 
 himself a Lower Canadian by birth, and acted as agent at 
 Westminster for the popular party in that Province. He 
 was as impotent as O'Connell, the spokesman of the Irish 
 popular party. If the Colonial Office was not quite the " den 
 of peculation and plunder " which Hume called it in 1838,* 
 it was an obscure and irresponsible department, where jobbery 
 was as rife as in Dublin Castle. In the ten years of colonial 
 crisis (1828-1838), there were eight different Colonial Secre- 
 taries and six Irish Chief Secretaries. 
 
 Over and above all this apathy and arrogance was the per- 
 fectly genuine incapacity to comprehend that idea of re- 
 sponsible government which even the most hot-headed and 
 erratic of the colonial agitators did instinctively comprehend. 
 Until Durham had at last opened Lord John Russell's eyes, 
 the great Whig statesman was as positive and explicit as the 
 Tories, Wellington and Stanley, in declaring that it was utterly 
 impossible for the Monarch's Representative overseas to 
 govern otherwise than by instructions from home and through 
 Ministers appointed by himself in the name of the King. One 
 constitutional King ruled over Great Britain, Canada, and 
 * Hansard, January 23.
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 91 
 
 Ireland. He could not be advised by two sets of Ministers. 
 The thing was not only an unthinkably absurd nullification of 
 the whole Imperial theory, but, in practice, would destroy and 
 dissolve the Empire. William IV. himself told Lord Melbourne 
 that it was his " fixed resolution never to permit any despatch 
 to be sent . . . that can for a moment hold out the most 
 distant idea of the King ever permitting the question even to 
 be entertained by His Majesty's confidential servants of a 
 most remote bearing relative to any change of the appoint- 
 ment of the King's Councils in the numerous Colonies." Lord 
 Stanley said, in 1837, that the " double responsibility " was 
 impossible, that there must either be separation or no respon- 
 sible government, and that it was " no longer a question of 
 expediency but of Empire." Lord John Russell, polished, 
 sober, scorning to descend to the mere vulgar abuse of the 
 colonials which disfigured the utterances of many of his 
 opponents, struggling visibly to reconcile Liberalism with 
 Empire, nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion. In a 
 debate of March 6, for example, in the same year, in proposing 
 the defiant Resolutions which provoked the rebellion in Canada, 
 he argued at length that a responsible Colonial Ministry was 
 "incompatible with the relations of a Mother Country and a 
 Colony," and would be " subversive of the power of the British 
 Crown," and again, on December 22, that it meant " indepen- 
 dence." O'Connell rightly replied to the former speech that 
 Russell and his followers were supporting " principles that had 
 been the fruitful source of civil war, dissension, and distrac- 
 tions in Ireland for centuries." The Radical group pushed 
 home the Irish parallel. Hume quoted, as applicable to 
 Canada, Fox's saying : " I would have the whole Irish Govern- 
 ment regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices, and I 
 firmly believe . . . that the more she is under Irish Govern- 
 ment the more she will be bound to English interests." Moles- 
 worth declared, what was perfectly true at that moment of 
 passion and folly, that his extreme political opponents wanted 
 to make the reconquest of Ireland a precedent for the recon- 
 quest of Canada. 
 
 It would repay the reader to turn back from this debate to 
 the Irish Repeal Debate of three years earlier, and listen to 
 Sir Robert Peel stating as one of the " truths which be too
 
 92 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 deep for argument," that the Repeal of the Union " must lead 
 to the dismemberment of this great Empire, must make Great 
 Britain a fourth-rate Power, and Ireland a savage wilderness," 
 which, as a matter of fact, it was at the very time he was 
 speaking, after thirty years of the Legislative Union, and seven 
 hundred years of irresponsible government. We must listen to 
 him claiming that the beneficent and impartial British Govern- 
 ment was " saving Ireland from civil war " between its own 
 " warring sects," whereas, in fact, it was that Government 
 which had brought those warring sects into being, which had 
 fomented and exploited their dissensions, which had provoked 
 the rebellion of 1798, and by its shameful neglect and par- 
 tiality in the succeeding generation had flung Ireland into a 
 social condition hardly clistinguishable from " civil war." And 
 we must realize that closely similar arguments, with special 
 stress on the right of taxation, had been used for the coercion 
 of the American Colonies, and that exactly the same argu- 
 ments, founded on the same inversion of cause and effect, were 
 used to defend the coercion of Canada. There, also, the Fitz- 
 gibbonist doctrine of revenge and oppression by a majority 
 vested with power was freely used, even by Lord John Russell, 
 in his speech of March 6, 1837, and of December 22 in the same 
 year, when he spoke of the " deadly animosity " of the French 
 and " of the wickedness of abandoning the British to proscrip- 
 tion, loss of property, and probably of lives." He ignored the 
 fact that the same state of anarchy had been reached in uni- 
 racial Upper Canada as in bi-racial Canada, and that the 
 " loyalists " in both cases were not only in the same state of 
 unreasoning alarm for their vested rights, but, in the spirit of 
 the Ulstermen of that day and ever since, were threatening 
 to " cut the painter," and declare for annexation to the 
 United States if their ascendancy were not sustained by the 
 Home Government. Then, as to-day, the ascendant minority 
 were supported in their threats by a section of British poli- 
 ticians. Lord Stanley's speech of March 8, 1837, where he 
 boasted that the " loyal minority of wealth, education, and 
 enterprise " would protect themselves, and, if necessary, call 
 in the United States, is being matched in speeches of to-day. 
 In all the debates of the period it is interesting to see the 
 ignorance which prevailed about the troubles in Upper Canada.
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 93 
 
 The racial question in Lower Canada, owing to the analogy 
 with Ireland, was seized on to the exclusion of the underlying 
 and far more important political question in both Provinces. 
 
 Against the policy of the two great political parties in 
 England the little group of Radicals struggled manfully, and 
 in the long run not in vain, although for years they had to 
 submit to insult and contumely in their patriotic efforts to 
 expose the vices of the colonial administration and to avert 
 the rebellion they foresaw in the Canadas. What they feared, 
 with only too good cause, was that the American and Irish 
 precedents would be followed, and war made for the coercion 
 of the Canadas, to be followed, if successful, by a still more 
 despotic form of government, which would in its turn provoke 
 a new revolt. Rather than that such a catastrophe should 
 take place, they went, rightly, to the extreme point of saying 
 that an *' amicable separation " should be arranged, main- 
 taining, what is indisputable, that the claims of humanity 
 should supersede the claims of possession. With Russell him- 
 self declaring till the eleventh hour that responsible govern- 
 ment was out of the question because it meant " separation," 
 they were quite justified in demanding that separation, if 
 indeed inevitable, should come about by agreement, not as 
 the possible result of a fratricidal war. For such a war, though 
 Russell could not see it until Durham made him see it, was the 
 only alternative to the grant of responsible government. But 
 the Radicals never used this argument unless circumstances 
 forced them to. Molesworth, in a debate of March 6, 1838, 
 denounced the prevailing view of the Colonies, insisted that 
 we should be proud of them and study their interests, that 
 reform, not separation, should be our aim. The Radicals were 
 fully aware of the alternatives, and were unwearied in pointing 
 out the justice and policy, in the Imperial interests, of acceding 
 to the colonial popular demands. Grote had expressed the 
 truth in the December debate of 1837, when he implored the 
 House " not to use a tone of triumph at the superior power of 
 England," but to remember that the colonists, " though free- 
 men, like ourselves," desired to remain, "if they could do so 
 with honour, in connection with England as the Mother 
 Country." He was followed by a gentleman named Inglis, 
 who said that " it was in Canada as in Ireland," a faction
 
 94 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 called itself Canada, and that we must bring "back the 
 colonists," like the Irish, " to subordination." 
 
 Roebuck, who led the Radicals in Canadian matters, had 
 some of the faults of Papineau and Mackenzie ; yet posterity 
 should give him and his comrades credit for a constructive 
 Imperialism which the great men of his day lacked. It is 
 now known that ho and Sir William Molesworth powerfully 
 influenced Durham's policy. In a paper he drew up at Dur- 
 ham's request on the eve of that nobleman's departure for 
 Canada he sketched a plan, imperfect in some details, but wise 
 in broad conception, for pacifying the Canadas, and went 
 further in elaborating a scheme, also defective, for the Con- 
 federation of British North America under the Crown on the 
 lines conceived by the despised demagogue, Mackenzie.* But 
 the two men who, by influencing Durham, probably did most 
 to save Canada for the Empire and to lay the foundations of 
 the present Imperial structure, were Charles Buller, the Radical 
 M.P., and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, both of whom accom- 
 panied the new Governor-General to Canada, and who are 
 generally believed to have inspired, if they did not actually 
 write, the greater part of the celebrated Report which became 
 the Magna Charta of the self-governing Colonies of the Empire. 
 
 A word about the events which ended in the publication of 
 this Report. Durham reached Canada at the end of May, 
 1 838, and in November was recalled in disgrace for exceeding 
 strange as it seems ! the almost absolute powers temporarily 
 entrusted to him. He was an extraordinary mixture of a 
 despot and a democrat, an extreme Radical in politics, an 
 autocrat in manners, as vain and tactless as he was generous 
 and sincere, making bitter enemies and warm friends in turn. 
 He began by winning and ended by estranging almost every 
 class in both Provinces of Canada, and returned to England 
 to all appearances a spent and extinguished meteor. There is 
 some truth, perhaps, in Greville's observation that, had he 
 been " plain John Lambton," he would never have been 
 chosen for Canada. It is certain that those who sent him 
 there little dreamed of the consequences of their action. Lord 
 Melbourne, the Prime Minister, in a letter to the Queen, 
 charged him with magnifying the Canadian troubles " in order 
 * " Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 17.
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 95 
 
 to give greater eclat to his own departure."* Still, he did his 
 work of investigation faithfully, and formed his conclusions 
 sanely, and there were plain men of greater ability at his elbow 
 hi the persons of Wakefield and Buller, by whose advice he 
 was wise enough to be guided. All opinion was against him 
 when news came of his recall, and even Roebuck was de- 
 nouncing him in the Spectator for his autocratic excesses ; but 
 a brilliant article by John Stuart Mill in the Westminster Review, 
 pleading for time and confidence, arrested the tide of obloquy. 
 
 Durham's long Report, and the events which followed it, 
 ought to be studied carefully by every voter, however lowly, 
 who has a voice in deciding the fate of Irish Home Rule. 
 After an exhaustive discussion of the causes of disorder in 
 Canada, Durham made two recommendations, the first of 
 incalculable importance, and proved by subsequent experience 
 to be right ; the second of minor consequence, and proved by 
 subsequent experience to be wrong. 
 
 The first was that responsible government should be in- 
 augurated both in Canada and in the Maritime Provinces of 
 North America, whose constitutional troubles Durham also 
 discussed. His proposal was that the Governor should govern 
 in accordance with advice given by Colonial Ministers in whom 
 the popular Assembly reposed confidence, and who, through 
 that Assembly, were in touch with popular opinion ; for it was 
 to the strangulation of popular opinion that Durham attributed 
 all the disorders and disasters of the past. This recommenda- 
 tion was eventually adopted, not in the Act subsequently 
 passed, but by instructions to the Governors concerned ; 
 instructions which were first interpreted in the full liberal 
 spirit by Lord Elgin in 1847. The Maritime Provinces at 
 various dates and under various Governors received full 
 responsible government by 1854. Responsible government 
 proved the salvation of Canada and the Empire, as it would 
 have proved, if given the chance, the salvation of Ireland and 
 a source of immensely enhanced strength to the Empire. 
 
 The second and less important recommendation, afterwards 
 
 embodied in the Act of 1 840, was the Union of the two Provinces 
 
 of Upper and Lower Canada. Here Lord Durham, misled 
 
 unhappily by the Irish precedent, fell into an error. During 
 
 * " Letters of Queen Victoria," vol. 1, November 22, 1838.
 
 96 
 
 his visit to Canada ho came near to accepting that higher con- 
 ception of a Federal Union with local Home Rule for each 
 Province, outlined by Roebuck and Mackenzie, and eventually 
 consummated thirty years later. When ho came home to 
 London he made a volte face, rejecting the Federal idea and 
 accepting its antitype, that Legislative and Administrative 
 Union of the two Provinces which had been rejected by Pitt 
 in 1791. There were, of course, economic arguments for 
 Union apart from the racial factor ; but they do not seem to 
 have been decisive with Durham. At the last moment he 
 gave way to a dread of predominant French influence in Lower 
 Canada, similar at bottom to his dread of the unchecked influence 
 of the British minority. While he feared that the latter, if let 
 alone, would inaugurate a reign of terror, he added also : 
 " Never again will the present generation of French-Canadians 
 yield a loyal submission to a British Government." The argu- 
 ment is inconsistent with the whole spirit of the Report, which 
 attributes the friction in both Provinces to bad political in- 
 stitutions. It is probable that Durham was really more influ- 
 enced by the quite reasonable recognition that the French were 
 relatively backward in civilization and ideas. He sought, there- 
 fore, both to disarm them politically and to anglicize them 
 socially, by amalgamating their political system with that of 
 wholly British Upper Canada. His calculation was that in a 
 joint assembly the British would have a small but sufficient 
 majority. The estimated population of Lower Canada was 
 550,000, of whom 450,000 were French, and 100,000 British 
 and Irish ; that of Upper Canada 400,000, all British and Irish. 
 That is to say, that in both Provinces together there was a 
 British and Irish majority of 100,000. The calculation over- 
 estimated the British element, but in the event this mistake 
 proved to be immaterial. Though Durham himself appears to 
 have intended representation to be in strict accordance with 
 population, the Union Act, passed in 1840, allotted an equal 
 number of representatives in the Joint Assembly to each of the 
 old Provinces. The assumption here was that the British 
 Members from Upper Canada would unite with those of old 
 Lower Canada to vote down the French, just as the Ulster 
 Protestants voted with English members to vote down the 
 Irish majority.
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 97 
 
 In practice the Union, after lasting twenty-six years, 
 eventually broke down. Durham's fear of French disloyalty 
 proved to be as groundless as his ideal of complete anglicization 
 was futile. It was neither necessary, sensible, nor possible to 
 extinguish French sentiment, and human nature triumphed 
 over this half-hearted effort to apply in dilution the medicine 
 of Fitzgibbonism to the Colonies. Little harm was done, 
 because the introduction of responsible government, far trans- 
 cending the Union in importance, worked irresistibly for good. 
 Parties did not run wholly on racial lines, but racialism was 
 encouraged by the equal representation of the two Provinces in 
 the Assembly, in spite of the greater growth of population in 
 the Upper Province. The system was unhealthy, and at last 
 produced a state of deadlock, in which two exactly equal 
 parties were balanced, and a stable Government impossible. 
 When that point was reached, men began to observe the 
 strong and supple Constitution of the adjacent United States, 
 and to recognize that a politically feeble Canada was courting 
 an absorption from that quarter which all Canadians disliked. 
 The Legislative Union was dissolved by the mutual consent of 
 the Provinces with the approval of the Mother Country, 
 and in 1867, under the British North America Act, the Federal 
 Union was formed which exists in such strength and stability 
 to-day. Fear of French disloyalty or tyranny was a night- 
 mare of the past, even with the British minority in Lower 
 Canada. It was realized that French national sentiment was 
 perfectly consistent with racial harmony under the British 
 flag. Upper Canada became Ontario, Lower Canada Quebec. 
 Each Province reserved a local autonomy for itself, and each 
 at the same moment voluntarily surrendered certain high 
 powers to a supreme centralized Government, in which both 
 had confidence. Such a political system is capable of indefinite 
 expansion. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined the 
 Federation at the outset, Prince Edward Island and British 
 Columbia a little later, and were followed in turn by the 
 successively developed Provinces which now form the united 
 and powerful Dominion of Canada. 
 
 Turn back to Ireland and Weigh well the analogy. Mutatis 
 mutandis, almost every paragraph of the Durham Report 
 applied with greater force to the Ireland of his day. The 
 
 7
 
 98 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 ascendancy of a casto and creed minority in Upper Canada ; 
 of a race minority in Lower Canada ; " the conflict of races, not 
 of principles "; the consequent obliteration of natural political 
 divisions, and the substitution of unnatural and vindictive 
 antagonisms demoralizing both sides to every quarrel ; the 
 universal disgust with and distrust of the British Government, 
 though for reasons diametrically opposite ; the hopelessness of 
 true reforms ; the perpetuation of abuses ; the stagnation of 
 trade and agriculture ; the re-emigration to America, and the 
 abuses of a Church Establishment with endowments from 
 sources by right public all these phenomena and many others 
 had their counterpart in Ireland. Some have disappeared. 
 The Church is disestablished. The land question is on the way 
 to settlement. The old ascendancy is mitigated. But many 
 of the political, and all the psychological, features of the situa- 
 tion which Durham described do, alas ! exist to-day in Ireland. 
 Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a land of bewildering para- 
 dox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of free political 
 life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same suppression 
 of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of a 
 Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the 
 country and accentuates for the time being the very divisions 
 it seeks to cure, but absolutely necessary for the final salvation 
 of Ireland. Durham, in the case of Canada, saw the truth, 
 and swept into the limbo of discredited bogies the old figments 
 of the coercionists. In a singularly noble and profound 
 passage (p. 229), revealing the ethical basis on which his 
 philosophy rested, he declared that even if the political freedom 
 of the Colony were to lead in the distant future to her separa- 
 tion from the Empire, she nevertheless had an indefeasible 
 moral right to the blessings of freedom ; but he prophesied 
 correctly that the connection with the Empire " would only 
 become more durable and advantageous by having more of 
 equality, of freedom, and of local administration." 
 
 If only Irish and British Unionists would realize that these 
 words came from a profound knowledge of human nature in 
 the mass, and are applicable to Irishmen in Ireland just as 
 much as to Irish, British, French, and Dutch in the Colonies ! 
 
 The tenacity of the old superstition is extraordinary, and we 
 can see it in the case of Canada. It remains a wonder to this
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 99 
 
 day how responsible government was ever introduced. There 
 can be no question that the Act of 1840 only secured a smooth 
 passage because, in providing for the Union of the French and 
 British Provinces, it represented a superficial analogy to that 
 Union of Britain and Ireland which had paralyzed Irish aspira- 
 tions. Durham himself had actually quoted both the Irish 
 and Scotch Unions as successful expedients for " compelling 
 the obedience of a refractory population," and thus arrived 
 at the outstanding and solitary defect of his otherwise noble 
 scheme. And O'Connell, in a debate upon the Report on 
 June 3, 1839, opposed the Canadian Union for Irish reasons, and 
 in language which after-experience proved to be perfectly cor- 
 rect. Happily, as we have seen, the defect was small and 
 curable, because the analogy with Ireland, where there was no 
 responsible, but, on the contrary, a separate and wholly irre- 
 sponsible Executive Government, and whose interests were 
 upheld by only 100 Members in a House of 670, was ex- 
 ceedingly remote. On responsible government itself the 
 Canadian Act of 1840 was entirely silent. We may thank 
 Providence for the fact. Durham's cardinal proposals had 
 received unbridled vituperation as sentimental rubbish where 
 they were not treasonable poison, the whole controversy taking 
 precisely the same form as in 1886 and 1893 over Mr. Glad- 
 stone's Home Rule Bills for Ireland. The Quarterly Review 
 spoke of "this rank and infectious Report," though it is fair 
 to say that Peel and Wellington did not join hi such wild 
 language. Five months after the issue of Lord Durham's 
 Report, Lord John Russell, in the debate of June 3, was deny- 
 ing, with the approval of all but the Radicals, the possibility 
 of responsible government as emphatically as ever. Durham 
 seems to have partially converted him in the summer, for in 
 introducing the Act itself in 1840 he cautiously committed 
 himself to the plan of instructing the Canadian Governor to 
 include in his Executive Council, or Cabinet, men expressly 
 chosen because they possessed the confidence of the Assembly. 
 But the Act as it stood, ignoring this vital change, was im- 
 peccably Conservative, and on that account went through 
 In some points it seemed, without good reason, to be even 
 reactionary, and was regarded in that light with displeasure 
 by the Radicals, with satisfaction by Whigs and Tories.
 
 100 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 While confirming the control of revenue by the Assembly, in 
 return for a fixed civil list, it took away from the Assembly, 
 and vested in the Executive, the power of recommending 
 money votes, and it also retained the Legislative Council or 
 Upper Chamber as a nominated, not as an elective, body. 
 Provided that the Executive had the confidence of the repre- 
 sentative Assembly or Lower House, the first point was per- 
 fectly sound, and the second was not vital ; but there was no 
 security for the condition precedent other than Russell's vague 
 outline of subsequent policy. While the supreme power of 
 the King, acting with or without the Governor, was reaffirmed 
 in the most vigorous terms, there was not a word in the Act 
 about the composition of the Executive Council or its relation 
 to the Assembly. 
 
 In Canada much the same misconceptions prevailed, and 
 promoted the acceptance of the Act by the supporters of the 
 old ascendancies. The question of the Union and the question 
 of responsible government, both raised by Lord Durham's 
 Report, became inextricably confused, and the various peti- 
 tions and resolutions of the time reflect this confusion. The 
 French opposed the Union and supported responsible govern- 
 ment on the same grounds, and in almost identical terms, as 
 the Irish opposed, and still oppose, their Union with Great 
 Britain, and ask for responsible government in Ireland. 
 Moderate Britishers supported both proposals, but the ex- 
 tremists of the old ascendancy bitterly denounced the whole 
 theory of responsible government, Union or no Union. Their 
 views are ably and incisively set forth by a Committee of the 
 old Legislative Council of Upper Canada, that is, by the 
 members of the " family compact," in a protest signed and 
 transmitted to London, where it was quoted with approval by 
 Lord John Russell. It may be found, together with other 
 petitions of the time, in the " Canadian Constitutional Develop- 
 ment " of Messrs. Grant and Egerton. With a few unessential 
 changes and modifications, the whole document might be 
 signed to-day by a Committee of Ulster Unionists, and I 
 heartily wish that every Ulsterman would read it in a spirit of 
 reason and generosity, and observe how every line of it was 
 falsified by history, before he declares that the situation of 
 Ulster is peculiar, and sets his hand or gives his adhesion
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 101 
 
 to a similar document. The signatories, who, it must be re- 
 membered, were a small ruling minority of the colonists, whose 
 power was artificially sustained by the British Governor, claim 
 that they alone, in glorifying and in battling for " colonial 
 dependence," are the true Imperialists. They hold dear the 
 " unity of the Empire." Responsible government within their 
 own Colony would lead to the " overthrowal " of that Empire, 
 and the reduction of Britain to a " second-rate Power." A 
 colonial Cabinet is absurd ; the local and sectional interests 
 are too strong ; the British Government must remain as 
 " umpire " to keep the parties from flying at one another's 
 throats. The majority, who are themselves a prey to divisions 
 (and one thinks of Nationalist splits), are seeking only for 
 illegitimate power ; the minority are for " justice and protec- 
 tion, and impartial government." Yet in the same breath we 
 are told that all is happy and peaceable as it is. Why subject 
 the Colony to the dissensions of party ? Why foster a spirit 
 of undying enmity among a people disposed to dwell together 
 in harmony ? The signatories argue from the history of Ire- 
 land and Scotland, " which never had responsible government, 
 yet government became impracticable the moment it ap- 
 proached to equal rights." Hence a Union, because " govern- 
 ment must be conducted with a view to some supreme ruling 
 power, which is not practicable with several independent Legis- 
 latures." Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they are, they 
 are not going to stand an attempt to " force independence " on 
 them. They will take the matter into their own hands, and, 
 if necessary, call in the United States to " replace the British 
 influence needlessly overthrown." 
 
 I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge 
 of bitterness to present controversies. The signatories lived 
 to see their errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote. 
 They, like the Irish Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and 
 sincere men, unconscious, we may assume, that their pessimism 
 about the tendencies of their fellow-citizens was really due to 
 the defective institutions which they themselves were uphold- 
 ing, and to the forcible suppression of the finer attributes of 
 human nature ; unconscious, we may also assume, of identify- 
 ing loyalty with privilege, and " the supreme ruling power " 
 with their own ruling power ; unconscious that what they
 
 102 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 called " Imperial Unity " was in reality on the verge of pro- 
 ducing Imperial disruption ; and wholly unconscious, certainly, 
 of the ghastly irony of their analogy drawn from the brutally 
 misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden, rack-rented Ireland of 
 their day, living, for no fault of its own, under a condition of 
 intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment towards 
 the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous 
 abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own 
 Colony, and were only abolished under the new regime which 
 they attacked with such vehemence before it came, and which, 
 because it transformed and elevated their own character and 
 that of their fellow-citizens, while drawing them closer to the 
 old country, they afterwards learned to regard with pride 
 and thankfulness. 
 
 As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper 
 Canadian statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study 
 the letters of Joseph Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia " agita- 
 tor," to Lord John Russell, in answer to that statesman's 
 speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued against responsible 
 government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto as his 
 text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and 
 humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word 
 applicable to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the 
 average Colonial Governor applies line for line to the average 
 Chief Secretary, coming at an hour's notice to a country he 
 has never seen, and knows nothing of, vested with absolute 
 powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out a policy 
 in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the 
 people whose interests he is supposed to guard. 
 
 The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with 
 the regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thomp- 
 son, the first Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the 
 principle of Ministerial responsibility. Some good reforms 
 were, indeed, made in the early years, but the Act was on the 
 verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham's son-in-law, 
 came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847. After many 
 party changes and combinations, French influence was tem- 
 porarily in the ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks 
 for compensating French as well as British subjects for losses 
 in the rebellion of 1837. Elgin, following the advice of his
 
 CANADA AND IRELAND 103 
 
 Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one, Lafontaine another, gave 
 the Royal Assent to the Bill. The British, with the old cry of 
 " loyalism," and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed 
 the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at 
 Montreal. Elgin, expostulating with Lord John Russell, who 
 was as pessimistic as ever, and threatened with recall, stuck to 
 his guns under fierce obloquy, and the principle of responsible 
 government was definitely established. It was applied at 
 about the same period to the other British Provinces of North 
 America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a 
 few years to Australia. 
 
 The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, 
 and the year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O'Brien, 
 surrendering in the historic cabbage-garden. Our thoughts go 
 back sixty-four years to 1783, when the American War of 
 Independence ended ; when, as a result of that war, British 
 Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the crisis 
 premature, alas ! of Ireland's fortunes, the Volunteers in vain 
 demanded the Reform which might have saved their country. 
 Look into historical details, read contemporary debates, and 
 watch the contrast. Within five years of responsible govern- 
 ment Canada solved all the great questions which had been 
 convulsing society for so long, and turned her liberated energies 
 towards economic development. In Ireland the abuses of ages 
 lingered to a point which seems incredible. The Church was 
 not disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats 
 of a Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already 
 become a Federated Dominion. The Irish land question, 
 dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled 
 until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903. 
 Education languishes at the present day. Canada started an 
 excellent system of municipal and local government in the 
 forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, 
 were " bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed 
 hi 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal 
 part of the gross abuses of municipal government under the 
 ascendancy system, and it was not till 1898 that the people at 
 large are admitted to a full share in county and town govern- 
 ment. Even this step inverted the natural order of things, for 
 the new authorities are hampered in their work by the incessant
 
 104 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 political agitation for the Home Rule which should have pre- 
 ceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain 
 and Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as 
 those who read the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, 
 on the same grounds as Canadian Home Rule, in the same 
 spirit, and often in terms absolutely identical. 
 
 Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was " so near "? 
 Let us reflect. Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule 
 because Canada was "so far"? On the contrary, it was a 
 superficial inference, drawn not merely from Ireland, but from 
 Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada and 
 South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application 
 of a philosophy which was already far in advance of the political 
 thought and morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that 
 if he had lived to see the Canadian Federation, the domestic 
 and Imperial results of South African Home Rule, and the 
 consequences of seventy more years of coercive government in 
 Ireland, he would still have regarded the United Kingdom in 
 the light of a successful expedient for " compelling the obedi- 
 ence of refractory populations "? In truth, Durham, like 
 ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew 
 nothing of Ireland, not even that her political system differed, 
 as it still differs, toto codo from that of Scotland, and came 
 into being under circumstances which had not the smallest 
 analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge went, he was a 
 student of human nature as affected by political institutions. 
 Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who 
 put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice 
 both in Australia and Canada. They said : " Your coercive 
 system degrades and estranges your own fellow-citizens. 
 Change it, and you will make them friendly, manly, and pros- 
 perous." They were right, and one reflects once more on the 
 terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in 1893, 
 that " if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would 
 have what Canada had had for fifty years."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 AUSTEALIA AND'IRELAND 
 
 I HAVE described the Canadian crisis at considerable length 
 because it was the turning-point in Imperial policy. Yet 
 policy is scarcely the right word. The Colonists themselves 
 wrenched the right to self-government from a reluctant 
 Mother Country, and the Mother Country herself was hardly 
 conscious of the loss of her prerogatives until it was too late 
 to regret or recall them. The men who on principle believed 
 in and laboured for Home Rule for Canada were a mere un- 
 considered handful in the country, while most of those who 
 voted for the Act of 1840 thought that it killed Home Rule. 
 No general election was held to obtain the " verdict of the 
 predominant partner " on the real question at issue, with the 
 cry of " American dollars " (which had, in fact, been paid) ; 
 with lurid portraits of Papineau and Mackenzie levying black- 
 mail on the Prime Minister, and quotations from their old 
 speeches to show that they were traitors to the Empire ; with 
 jeremiads about the terrors of Rome, the abandonment of 
 the loyal minority, and the dismemberment of the Empire, to 
 shake the nerves and stimulate the slothful conscience of an 
 ignorant electorate. Had there been any such opportunity 
 we know it would have been used, and we can guess what the 
 result would have been ; for nothing is easier, alas ! than to 
 spur on a democracy with such cries as these to the exercise 
 of the one function it should refrain from interference with 
 another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere else. As it 
 was, a merciful veil fell over Canada ; Lord Elgin's action in 
 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference 
 to colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, 
 we cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and 
 the nation. 
 
 105
 
 106 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 It was in this mood that the measures conferring self-govern- 
 ment on the Australasian Colonies, 12,000 miles away from 
 the Mother Country, and exciting proportionately less concern 
 than Canada, were passed a few years later. 
 
 From the landing of the first batch of convicts at Botany 
 Bay in 1788, New South Wales, the Mother Colony, was a 
 penal settlement pure and simple, under military Government, 
 for some thirty years. The island Colony, Tasmania, founded 
 under the name of Van Diemen's Land in 1803, was used for 
 the same purpose. Victoria, originally Port Phillip, just 
 escaped a like fate in 1803, and remained uncolonized till 1835, 
 when the free settlers set their faces against the penal system, 
 and in 1845, acting like the Bostonians of 1774 with the famous 
 cargo of tea, refused to allow a cargo of convicts to land. 
 South Australia, first settled in 1829, also escaped ; so did New 
 Zealand, which was annexed to the Crown in 1839. Western 
 Australia, dating from 1826, proceeded on the opposite principle 
 to that of Victoria. Free from convicts until 1849, when 
 transportation to other Colonies was checked at their own 
 repeated request, and came to an end in 1852, this Colony, 
 owing to a chronic shortage of labour, actually petitioned the 
 Home Government to divert the stream of criminals to its 
 shores, with the result that in ten years' time nearly half the 
 male adults in the Colony, and more than half in the towns, 
 were, or had been, convicts. It was not until 1865, under 
 strong pressure from the other Colonies, that the system 
 was finally abolished which threw Western Australia forty 
 years behind its sister Colonies in the attainment of Home 
 Rule. 
 
 The transportation policy has been unmercifully criticized, 
 and with all the more justice in that Pitt, when the American 
 war closed the traditional dumping-ground for criminals, 
 had the chance of employing the exiled loyalists of America, 
 many of whom were starving in London, as pioneers of the new 
 lands in the Antipodes. " The outcasts of an old society 
 cannot form the foundations of a new one," said a Parlia- 
 mentary Report of July 28, 1785." But they could do so, and 
 did do so. Ruskin's saying, a propos of Australia, that 
 " under fit conditions the human race does not degenerate, but 
 wins its way to higher levels," comes nearer the truth. In an
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 107 
 
 amazingly short time after the transportation policy was 
 reversed the taint disappeared. We must remember, however, 
 that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially hi 
 the later period, a large number of the earlier convicts were 
 the product of that " stupid severity of our laws " which the 
 Vicar of Wakefield deplored, and to this category belonged 
 many an unhappy Irish peasant, sound in character, but driven 
 into Whiteboyism, or into the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 by 
 some of the worst laws the human brain ever conceived. 
 Hundreds of these men survived the barbarous and brutalizing 
 ordeal of a penal imprisonment to become prosperous and 
 industrious citizens. 
 
 It was not until 1825, or thereabouts, that free white settlers, 
 many Irishmen among them, came in any substantial number 
 to the Mother Colony of New South Wales, and not until 
 1832 that these men began to press claims for the management 
 of their own affairs, under the inspiration of an Irish surgeon's 
 son, William Wentworth, the Hampden of Australia. The 
 later Colonies rapidly came into line, Western Australia, for 
 the reason given above, remaining stationary. The first repre- 
 sentative institutions were granted in 1842 to New South Wales, 
 and in 1850 to Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. At 
 that date, therefore, these settlements stood in much the same 
 constitutional position as the Canadas had stood in 1791 
 (although technically their Constitutions were of a different 
 kind), but with this important difference, that the Act of 
 1850, " for the better Government of Her Majesty's Australian 
 Colonies," gave power to those Colonies to frame new Con- 
 stitutions for themselves. This they soon proceeded to do, 
 each constructing its own, but all keeping in view the same 
 model, the British Constitution itself, and aiming at the same 
 ideal, responsible Government by a Colonial Cabinet under a 
 Government representing the Crown. Since responsible 
 Government in Great Britain itself was not a matter of legal 
 enactment, but the product of slowly evolved conventions and 
 precedents, to which political scientists had not yet given a 
 scientific form, it is no wonder that the colonial Constitution- 
 makers found great difficulty in expressing exactly what they 
 wanted in legal terms, and, indeed, none of them came near 
 succeeding ; but time, their own political instinct, a succession
 
 108 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of sensible Governors, and the forbearance of the Home Govern- 
 ment solved the problem, and evolved home-ruled States 
 legally subordinate to the Crown, but with a Constitution closely 
 resembling our own. The Constitutions became law by Acts 
 of the Imperial Parliament passed by a Liberal Ministry in 
 1855. They are of unusual interest because they represent 
 the first rude attempt to put into legal language a small part 
 of the theory of the British Constitution as applied to depen- 
 dencies of the Crown. 
 
 In the most vital point of all, the relation of the dependency 
 to the Home Government (as distinguished from questions of 
 internal political structure), they are almost as reserved as the 
 Canadian Act of 1840, which, as we have seen, did not recognize 
 by a word the duty of the Governor to govern through a 
 Colonial Cabinet. In certain clauses they hint, by distant 
 implication, at the existence of such a Cabinet, responsible to 
 the colonial popular Legislature the Canadian Act did not 
 assume even that but they do not anywhere imply that the 
 Governor is bound normally to place himself in the hands of 
 that Cabinet, while they expressly and rightly reaffirm the 
 supreme power of the Crown, whether acting through the 
 Governor or not, over colonial legislation. 
 
 How far this reticence about responsible Government 
 facilitated the passage of the Australian Acts in the British 
 Parliament, as it certainly facilitated the Canadian Act of 
 1840, it is difficult to decide. It was probably a factor of 
 some importance. At any rate, it is true to say that Home 
 Rule, as in Canada, was mainly a result of practice rather than 
 of statutory enactment. The case of New Zealand is a striking 
 example of this. In 1852 New Zealand obtained from a Tory 
 Government a Constitutional Act, which resembles the Canadian 
 Act of 1840 in abstaining from any expression, direct or indirect 
 which implies the existence of a Colonial Cabinet, and it is 
 probable that the framers of the Act intended no such develop- 
 ment, but on the contrary contemplated a permanent, irre- 
 movable Executive. But the Act was no sooner passed than 
 an agitation began for responsible government, under the 
 leadership of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, part-author of the 
 Durham Report, and at that time a member of the New 
 Zealand Assembly. By 1855, when the Australian Acts were
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 109 
 
 passed, New Zealand, without further legislation, had obtained 
 what she wanted. 
 
 To complete the story, Queensland, carved out of New South 
 Wales in 1859, entered upon full responsible government at 
 once, and Western Australia, retarded for so long by the 
 servile system of convict-labour, gained the same rights in 
 1890. 
 
 Reading the debates of the middle of the nineteenth century, 
 one is left with the impression that the Australasian Colonies 
 obtained Home Rule by virtue of their distance, and because 
 most politicians at home could not be bothered to fight hard 
 against a principle which at bottom they disliked as heartily 
 for the Colonies as for Ireland. The views of the various 
 parties were not much changed since the days of the crisis in 
 Canada. There were some able Colonial Secretaries who 
 thoroughly understood and believed in the principle of respon- 
 sible government. On the other hand, some Liberals were not 
 yet converted, though Liberal Governments fathered the 
 Constitutional Acts of 1850 and 1855. Disraeli's well-known 
 saying in 1852 that " these wretched Colonies will all be inde- 
 pendent, too, in a few years, and are a mill-stone round our 
 necks," was typical of the Tory attitude.* Lord John Russell, 
 in the same year, 1852, was complaining, as Lord Morley tells 
 us,f that we were " throwing the shields of our authority away," 
 and leaving " the monarchy exposed in the Colonies to the 
 assaults of democracy." A group of Radicals, headed by 
 Sir William Molesworth and Hume in Parliament, and by 
 Wakefield from outside, still pushed the policy of emancipation 
 energetically and persistently on the principle which they had 
 urged in the case of Canada, that freedom was better both for 
 the Colonies and the Mother Country. 
 
 But Molesworth and Wakefield gained one illustrious convert 
 and coadjutor in the person of Mr. Gladstone, whose speeches 
 on the Colonies at this period, 1849 to 1855, placed him, in 
 regard to that topic, in the Radical ranks, and in veiled oppo- 
 sition to the Whig leaders. Lord Morley quotes a minute from 
 his hand, written in 1852 in answer to the view of Lord John 
 
 * Letter to Lord Malmesbury, August 13, 1852 ("Memoirs of an Ex- 
 Minister, " by the Earl of Malmesbury, vol. i., p. 344). 
 f " Life of Gladstone," vol. i., p. 363.
 
 110 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Russell, referred to above, where he says " that the nominated 
 Council and independent Executive were not 'shields of 
 authority,' but sources of weakness, disorder, disunion, and 
 disloyalty." His Parliamentary and platform speeches, passing 
 with little notice at the time, nevertheless remain the most 
 eloquent and exalted expression of wise colonial poh'cy that 
 is to be found in our language. If it was not till a genera- 
 tion later that he applied the same arguments to the case of 
 Ireland, the arguments nevertheless did apply to Ireland almost 
 word for word. Proximity to the Mother Country does not 
 affect them. Mr. Gladstone attacks the problem on its human 
 side, showing that coercive government is always and every- 
 where bad for those who administer it, and bad for those who 
 live under it, expensive, inefficient, demoralizing, and that the 
 longer it is maintained the more difficult it is to remove. He 
 condemns the fallacy of preparing men by slow degrees for 
 freedom, and the " miserable jargon about fitting them for the 
 privileges thus conferred, while in point of fact every year and 
 every month during which they are retained under the adminis- 
 tration of a despotic Government renders them less fit for free 
 institutions." As to cost, " no consideration of money ought 
 to induce Parliament to sever the connection between any one 
 of the Colonies and the Mother Country," but the greater part 
 of the cost, he urged, was due to the despotic system itself. 
 His words are more applicable to the Ireland of to-day than 
 the Ireland of the middle of the nineteenth century, for it is 
 one of the many painful anomalies of Irish history that that 
 country, at the lowest point of its economic misery, was 
 paying a relatively enormous contribution to Imperial funds, 
 and, incidentally, to the colonial vote, while the Colonies were 
 maintained at a loss correspondingly large, and at times even 
 larger.* But cost is, after all, a very small matter. The first 
 consideration is the character and happiness of human beings, 
 and here Gladstone's words, like Durham's, have a universal 
 application. If the reader cannot study them at length in 
 
 * Annual Treasury Returns [" Imperial Revenue (Collection and Expendi- 
 ture) "]. According to these returns, Ireland's Imperial contribution in 1839, 
 before the famine, was JE3,626,322 ; in 1849, after the famine, 2,613,778, 
 and in 1859-60 no less than ,5,396,000. At the latter date the Colonies were 
 estimated to cost three and a half millions a year, of which nine-tenths were 
 contributed by the taxpayers at home, British and Irish.
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 111 
 
 Hansard, he should read the great speech on the New Zealand 
 Bill in 1852, and Lord Morley's masterly summary of others. 
 I conclude with a passage quoted by him from a platform 
 speech at Chester in 1855, the year when the Australian 
 Constitutions were sanctioned. " Experience has proved that 
 if you want to strengthen the connection between the Colonies 
 and this country, if you want to see British law held in respect, 
 and British institutions adopted and beloved in the Colonies, 
 never associate with them the hated name of force and coercion 
 exercised by us at a distance over their rising fortunes. Govern 
 them upon a principle of freedom." At that moment, after 
 half a century of coercion and neglect under what was called 
 the " Union," Ireland was bleeding, as it seemed, to death. 
 Scarcely recovered from the stunning blow of the famine, she 
 was undergoing in a fresh dose of clearances and evictions the 
 result of that masterpiece of legislative unwisdom, the Encum- 
 bered Estates Act. Her people were leaving her by hundreds 
 of thousands, cursing the name of England as bitterly as the 
 evicted Ulster farmers and the ruined weavers of the eighteenth 
 century had cursed it, and bearing their wrongs and hatred to 
 the same friendly shore, America. For the main stream of 
 emigration, which before the Union had set towards the 
 American States, and from the Union until the famine towards 
 Canada, reverted after the famine towards the United States, 
 impregnating that nation with an hostility to Great Britain 
 which in subsequent years became a grave international danger, 
 and which, though greatly diminished, still remains an 
 obstacle to the closer union of the English-speaking races. 
 On the other hand, it is interesting to observe that among the 
 Irish emigrants to countries within the Empire, and a very 
 important part of this emigration was to Australasia, the anti- 
 British sentiment was far less tenacious, though the affection 
 for their own native country was no less passionate. 
 
 Whatever we may conclude about the motives behind the 
 concession of Home Rule to Australia and New Zealand, we 
 may regard it as fortunate that they lay too far away for any 
 close criticism from statesmen at home, whether before or 
 after the attainment of self-government. Most of these 
 statesmen would have been scandalized by the manner in 
 which these vigorous young democracies, destitute of the
 
 112 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 patrician element, shaped their own political destiny by the 
 light of nature and in the teeth of great difficulties. Almost 
 to a man their leaders in this great work would have been 
 regarded as " turbulent demagogues and dangerous agitators," 
 and often were so regarded, when the rumour of their activities 
 penetrated to far-off London. The old catchwords of revolu- 
 tion, spoliation and treason, consecrated to the case of 
 Ireland, would have been applied here with equal vehemence, 
 and were in fact applied by the official classes in the Colonies 
 themselves, round whom small anti-democratic groups, calling 
 themselves " loyal," crystallized, as in the Provinces of Upper 
 Canada and in Ireland, and with whom the ruling classes at 
 home were in instinctive sympathy. There were stormy, 
 agitated times, there were illegal movements against the recep- 
 tion of convicts, struggles over land questions, religious 
 questions, financial questions, the emancipation of ex-convicts, 
 and the many difficult problems raised by the discovery of 
 gold and the mushroom growth of digger communities in 
 remote places. There was in the air more genuine lawlessness 
 irrespective, I mean, of revolt against bad laws than ever 
 existed in Ireland, though there was never at any time any 
 practical grievance approaching in magnitude to the practical 
 grievances of Ireland at the same period. But, could the spirit 
 of English statesmanship towards analogous problems in 
 Ireland have been maintained in Australasia, systematically 
 translated into law and enforced with the help of coercion acts 
 by soldiers and police, communities would have been artificially 
 produced presenting all the lawless and retrograde features of 
 Ireland. 
 
 The famous affair of the Eureka Stockade in 1854 is an 
 interesting illustration. A great mass of diggers collected in 
 the newly discovered Ballarat goldfields had petitioned repeat- 
 edly against the Government regulations about mining licences, 
 for which extortionate fees were levied. This was before 
 responsible government. The goldfields were not represented 
 in the Legislature, and there was no constitutional method of 
 redress. The authorities held obstinately to their obsolete and 
 irritating regulations, and eventually the miners revolted under 
 the leadership of an Irishman, Peter Lalor, and with the watch- 
 word " Vinegar Hill." There was a pitched battle with the
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 113 
 
 military forces of the Crown, ending after much bloodshed in 
 the victory of the soldiers. Lalor was wounded, and carried 
 into hiding by his friends. Other captured rioters were tried 
 for " high treason " before juries of townsmen picked by the 
 Crown on the lines long familiar in Ireland ; but even these 
 juries refused to convict, as they so often refused to convict in 
 cases of agrarian crime in Ireland. The State trials were then 
 abandoned, a Royal Commission reported against the licence 
 system, and Parliamentary representation was given to the 
 goldfields. It came to be universally acknowledged that the 
 talk of " treason " was nonsense, that the outbreak had been 
 provoked by laws which could not be constitutionally changed, 
 and that the moral was to change them, not to expatriate 
 and persecute those who had suffered under them. Lalor 
 reappeared, entered political life, became Speaker of the 
 reformed Assembly of 1856, and lived and died respected by 
 everyone. He now appears as a prominent figure in a little 
 book entitled "Australian Heroes," and it is admitted that 
 the whole episode powerfully assisted the movement for 
 responsible government in the Colony. Smith O'Brien, 
 Meagher, Mitchell, and others concerned in the Irish rebellion 
 of 1848 were at that moment languishing in the penal settle- 
 ment of Tasmania for sedition provoked by laws fifty times 
 worse ; laws, too, that a Royal Commission three years earlier 
 had shown to be inconsistent with social peace, and which 
 others subsequently condemned in still stronger terms. From 
 their first establishment far back in the seventeenth century 
 it took two centuries to abolish these laws. In the Australian 
 case it took one year. 
 
 As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such 
 an important part in the splendid work of building up these 
 new communities, and who are still estimated to constitute a 
 quarter of the population, one can only marvel at the intensity 
 of the prejudice which declared these men " unfit " for self- 
 government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by the 
 discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, 
 not only as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, 
 but as barristers, judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, 
 as honoured leaders in municipal and political life, as Speakers 
 of the Representative Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime 
 
 8
 
 114 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Ministers of the Crown.* It is true, and the fact cannot 
 surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of race and creed in 
 Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad government, 
 were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia, as 
 in Canada. Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing 
 discord where no cause for discord existed. But the common 
 sense of the community and the pure air of freedom tended to 
 sterilize, though they have not to this day wholly killed, these 
 germs of disease. A career was opened to every deserving 
 Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant. Hungry, hopeless, 
 listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up flourish- 
 ing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne 
 and Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat gold- 
 fields. An Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first trans- 
 continental expedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, 
 financed it ; Wentworth was the father of Australian liberties. 
 An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir Redmond Barry, founded the 
 Public Library, Museum, and University of Melbourne. In 
 the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the names 
 of Irish Catholics, men to whom no worthy political career 
 was open in their own country, were prominent. Sir John 
 O'Shanassy, for example, was three times Prime Minister of 
 Victoria, Sir Brian O'Loughlen once. Sir Charles Gavan 
 Duffy, a member of O'Shanassy's Cabinets, and at last Prime 
 Minister himself, is the colonial statesman whose career and 
 personality are the best proof of what Ireland has lost in high- 
 minded, tolerant, constructive statesmanship, through a system 
 which silenced or drove from her shores the men who loved 
 her most, who saw her faults and needs with the clearest eyes, 
 and who sought to unite her people on a footing of self-reliance 
 and mutual confidence. One of the ablest of O'Connell's 
 young adjutants, editor and founder of the Nation, part- 
 organizer of the Young Ireland Movement which united men 
 of opposite creeds in one of the finest national movements ever 
 organized in any country, Duffy's central aim had been to 
 give Ireland a native Parliament, where Irishmen could solve 
 their own problems for themselves He saw the rebellion of 
 1848 fail, and Mitchell, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, 
 
 * Full information may bo found in " The Irish in Australia," by J. F. 
 HoL'an.
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 115 
 
 and O'Donoghue transported to Tasmania ; he laboured on 
 himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other 
 objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless 
 odds, and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the 
 first Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional 
 Act of 1855. From the beginning to the end of an honourable 
 political career which lasted thirty years, he made it his 
 dominant purpose to ensure that Australia should be saved 
 from the evils which cursed Ireland ; from government by a 
 favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious in- 
 equality and the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took 
 a large share in bringing about their exclusion. His Land Act 
 of 1862, for example, where he had another Roman Catholic 
 Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary, put an end in those 
 districts where it was fairly worked to the grave abuses caused 
 by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land by 
 absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the 
 country by yeoman farmers. 
 
 In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of 
 good land laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in 
 Ireland from an agrarian system incalculably more absurd and 
 unjust than anything known in any other part of the Empire. 
 The stagnation of Western Australia was originally due to the 
 cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of men. 
 South Australia was retarded for some little time from the 
 same cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all ham- 
 pered in the same way. It was not a question, as in Ireland, 
 and to a less degree in Prince Edward Island, of the legal 
 relations between the landlord and tenant of lands originally 
 confiscated, but of the grant and sale of Crown lands. Yet the 
 after-results, especially in the check to tillage and the creation 
 of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.* 
 
 Duffy was not the only colonial statesman to apply Irish 
 experience to the problems of newly settled countries. An 
 Englishman who became one of the greatest of colonial states- 
 men and administrators, the Radical Imperialist, Sir George 
 Grey, began life as a Lieutenant on military service in Ireland 
 in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes he had 
 
 * For an excellent historical description of the various Australian land 
 systems, see the official "Year-Book of the Commonwealth/' 1909.
 
 116 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes where 
 his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law. 
 "Ireland," his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,* 
 " was to him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities." The people 
 had " good capacities for self-government," but Englishmen 
 " showed a vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and 
 attributed to inherent lawlessness what was a revolt against 
 bad economic conditions. " All that they or their children 
 could hope for was to obtain, after the keenest competition, the 
 temporary use of a spot of land on which to exercise their 
 industry " ; " for the tenant's very improvements went to 
 swell the accumulations of the heirs of an absentee, not of his 
 own." " Haunted by the Irish problem," Grey made it his 
 effort first in South Australia, and afterwards in New Zealand, 
 where he was both Governor and Premier at various times, to 
 secure the utmost possible measure of Home Rule for the 
 colonists, and, in pursuance of a policy already inaugurated 
 by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to establish a land system 
 based, not on extravagant free grants, or on private tenure, 
 but on sales by the State to occupiers at fair prices. The aim 
 was to counteract that excessive accumulation of people in 
 the large cities which, thanks to imperfect legislation, still 
 exists in most of the Australian States. Subsequent New 
 Zealand land policy has been generally in the right direction, 
 and is acknowledged to be highly successful. In the Australian 
 mainland States the absentee and the squatter caused constant 
 difficulties and occasional disorder. The Commonwealth at 
 the present day is suffering for past neglect, and has found 
 itself within the last year compelled to imitate New Zealand 
 in placing taxes on undeveloped land, with a higher percentage 
 against absentees. 
 
 Let us add that Grey, like Duffy and most of the strongest 
 advocates of Home Rule for the Colonies, was a Federalist long 
 before Federation became practical politics, seeing in that 
 policy the best means of achieving the threefold aim of giving 
 each Colony in a group ample local freedom, of binding the 
 whole group together into a compact, coherent State, and of 
 strengthening the connection between that State and the 
 Mother Country. As Governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861 
 * " Life of Sir George Grey," Professor G. C. Henderson.
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 117 
 
 he vainly urged the Home Government to promote a Federal 
 Union of the various South African States, Dutch and British, 
 in order, as he said, to create " an United South Africa under 
 the British flag," a scheme which, it is generally agreed, could 
 then have been carried out, and which would have saved South 
 Africa from terrible disasters. And he wished to apply the 
 same Federal principle to the Australian Colonies, and to the 
 case of Ireland and Great Britain. 
 
 He realized earlier than most men that the talk of " separa- 
 tion " and " disloyalty " was, in his own words already quoted, 
 the result of a " vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," 
 and that to govern men by their own consent, to let them work out 
 their own ideals in their own way, to encourage, not to repress, 
 their sense of nationality, is the best way to gain their affection, 
 or, if we choose to use that very misleading word, their loyalty. 
 
 Australia and New Zealand present remarkable examples of 
 this beneficent process, Australia in particular, because there, 
 for a long time even after the introduction of responsible 
 government and, indeed, until a dozen years ago, there was a 
 large party of so-called " disloyalists " who were never weary 
 of decrying British influences and upholding Australian 
 nationality. Mr. Jebb, in his " Colonial Nationalism," gives 
 an interesting account of this movement and of its organ, the 
 widely circulated Sydney Bulletin, with its furiously anti- 
 British views, its Radicalism, its Republicanism, and what 
 not. He shows amusingly how entirely harmless the propa- 
 ganda really was, and what a healthy effect it actually had in 
 promoting an independence of feeling and national self-respect 
 among Australians, to such a degree that when the South 
 African War broke out, there was a universal outburst of 
 patriotism and a universal desire, which was realized, to share 
 to the full as a nation in the expense, danger, and hardships 
 of the war. Mr. Jebb adds the interesting suggestion 
 that the reluctance of New Zealand to enter the Australian 
 Federation may be partly due to the strong individual sentiment 
 of nationality evoked within her by the war and the exceptional 
 exertions she made to aid the Imperial troops. 
 
 His book is a psychological study of men in the mass. What 
 he sets out to prove, and what he does successfully prove, is 
 that the encouragement of minor nationalities is not merely
 
 118 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 consistent with, but essential to, the unity of the Empire. Yet 
 he never mentions Ireland, not even for the purpose of proving 
 her an exception to the rule, and I do not think I ever gauged 
 the full extent of the prejudice against that country until I 
 realized that in such a book such a topic did not receive even 
 a line of notice ; yet one would naturally suppose that it was 
 as important to the Empire, morally and strategically, to 
 possess the affection and respect of four and a half million 
 citizens within 60 miles of the British coast as of the same 
 number of citizens at the Antipodes. 
 
 Mr. Jebb is a Unionist. How he reaches his conclusion I 
 do not know. It would seem to be beyond human power to 
 construct a case against Home Rule for Ireland, with its 
 strongly marked individuality of character and sentiment, 
 which did not textually stultify his case for the more distant 
 dependencies. His party generally is in sympathy with the 
 views expressed in his book, and has done much to further 
 them. How do they reconcile them with opposition to Home 
 Rule for Ireland ? How do they explain away the support 
 for that policy in the Dominions ? It seems to me that their 
 only resource would be to say : " We are bound to maintain, 
 and we have the necessary physical force to maintain, the 
 present political system in Ireland, because to alter it would 
 impair the formal legislative ' unity ' of the United Kingdom ; 
 but let us frankly admit that as long as we take this view there 
 can be no ' Union ' in the highest sense of the word. Ireland 
 must be retarded and estranged. We cannot raise Territorial 
 Volunteers within her borders ; on the contrary, we must keep 
 and pay for a standing army of police to preserve our authority 
 there. Her population must diminish, her vital energy ebb 
 away to other lands ; as a market for our goods and as a source 
 of revenue for Imperial purposes she must remain undeveloped 
 and unprogressive. She will continue rightly to agitate for 
 Home Rule, and this agitation will always be baneful both to 
 her and to us. It will distract her energies from her own 
 economic and social problems. It will embitter and degrade 
 our politics, and dislocate our Parliamentary institutions. 
 She must suffer, we must suffer, the Empire must suffer. It 
 is sad, but inevitable." 
 
 Morality aside, is that common sense ? Is it strange that
 
 AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 119 
 
 the Colonies themselves regard such logic, when applied to 
 Ireland, as perverted and absurd ? 
 
 Before leaving Australia we have only to recall the fact that 
 at the close of the last century, after a generation of contro- 
 versy and negotiation, the Canadian example of 1867 was at 
 length imitated, and the Federal Union formed which amalga- 
 mated all the mainland States, together with Tasmania, in 
 the Commonwealth of Australia, and that the Union was 
 sanctioned and legalized by the Imperial Act of 1900. New 
 Zealand preferred to remain a distinct State. The Australians 
 departed in some important respects from the Canadian 
 model, the main difference being that a greater measure of 
 independence was retained by the individual States, and 
 smaller powers delegated to the central Government. This 
 was a matter of voluntary arrangement as between the States 
 themselves, the Home Government standing wholly aside on 
 the sound principle that Australia knew its own interests best, 
 and that what was best for Australia was best for the Empire.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 
 
 IN the years 1836-37, when Wentworth was agitating for 
 self -government in New South Wales, and when Canada was in 
 rebellion for the lack of it, thousands of waggons, driven by 
 men smarting under the same sort of grievance, were jolting 
 northward across the South African veld bearing Dutch 
 families from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope 
 to the new realms we now know as the Orange River Colony 
 and the Transvaal. The " Great Trek " was a form of protest 
 against bad government to which we have no parallel in the 
 Empire save in the wholesale emigrations from Ireland at 
 various periods of her history after the Treaty of Limerick, 
 again after the destruction of the wool trade, again in 1770-1777, 
 after the Ulster evictions, and lastly after the great famine. 
 The trekkers, like the Irish emigrants, nursed a resentment 
 against the British Government which was a source of untold 
 expense and suffering in the future. Indeed, the whole history 
 of South Africa bears a close resemblance to the history of 
 Ireland. In no other part of the Empire, save in Ireland, was 
 the policy of the Home Government so persistently misguided, 
 in spite of constantly recurring opportunities for the repair of 
 past errors. Fatality seems from first to last to have dogged 
 the footsteps of those who tried to govern there. Before the 
 British conquest the Dutch East India Company and the 
 Netherlands Government were as unsuccessful as their British 
 successors, whose legal claim to the Cape, established for the 
 second time by conquest in 1806, was definitely confirmed by 
 the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Dutch colonists were a 
 fine race of men, whose ancestors, like the Puritan founders of 
 New England, had fled in 1652 from religious persecution, and 
 who retained the virile qualities of their race. Though in 
 
 120
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 121 
 
 many respects they resembled the backward and intensely 
 conservative French-Canadian inhabitants, they differed from 
 them, and resembled their closer relatives in race, the New 
 Englanders, in an innate passion for free representative 
 government. They had rebelled repeatedly against their 
 Dutch oppressors, and had gone through a brief Republican 
 phase. It is an example, therefore, of the thoughtless inconse- 
 quence of our old colonial policy that we gave the French- 
 Canadians, who were the least desirous of it, the form, without 
 the spirit, of representative institutions, while we denied, until 
 it was too late to avert racial discord, even the form to the 
 Cape Dutch. In truth, the Colony seems to have been regarded 
 purely in the light of a naval station, while the British and Irish 
 inflow of settlers, dating from about the year 1820, contem- 
 poraneously with the advent of free settlers in Australia, sug- 
 gested the possibility of racial oppression by the Dutch 
 majority. Yet if there was little real reason to fear oppression 
 by the French in Canada, there was still less reason to fear 
 such oppression in the Cape, where Dutch ideals and civilization 
 were far more similar to those of the British. In America 
 the absorption of the Dutch Colonies in the seventeenth 
 century had led to the peaceful fusion of both races, nor was 
 there any reason why, under wise rule, the same fusion should 
 not have occurred in South Africa. Until 1834 authority was 
 purely military and despotic. In that year was established a 
 small Legislative Council of officials and nominated members, 
 with no representative element. In 1837 came the Great Trek. 
 No one disputes that the Dutch colonists had grievances, 
 without the means of redress. As usual, we find a land question 
 in the shape of enhanced rents charged by Government after 
 the British occupation ; the Dutch language was excluded 
 from official use, and English local institutions were introduced 
 with unnecessary abruptness ; but the principal grievance con- 
 cerned the native tribes. Slavery existed in the Colony, and 
 its borders were continually threatened by these tribes. The 
 Dutch colonists were often terribly brutal to the natives ; 
 nevertheless there is little doubt that a tactful and sympathetic 
 policy could easily have secured for them a more humane 
 treatment, and the abolition of slavery without economic 
 dislocation. But a strong humanitarian sentiment was
 
 122 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 swooping over England at the time, including in its range the 
 negro slaves of Jamaica and the unconquered Kaffirs of South 
 Africa, but absolutely ignoring, let us note in passing, the 
 economic serfdom of the half-starved Irish peasantry at our 
 very doors. Members of this school took too little account of 
 the tremendous difficulties faced in South Africa by small 
 hand fu Is of white colonists hi contact with hordes of savages. 
 The Colonial Government, with a knowledge of the conditions 
 gained only from well-meaning but somewhat prejudiced 
 missionaries, endeavoured from 1815 onwards to enforce an 
 impracticable equality between white and coloured men, and 
 abolished slavery at one sudden stroke in 1833 without reason- 
 able compensation. A large number of the Dutch, unable to 
 tolerate this treatment, deserted the British flag. Those that 
 remained were under suspicion for more than thirty years, so 
 that political progress was very slow. It was not till 1854 
 that the Colony received a Representative Assembly, and not 
 until 1872, eighteen years later than in Australia, and twenty- 
 five years later than in Canada, that full responsible govern- 
 ment was established. 
 
 Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the voluntary exiles, had 
 published a proclamation in the following terms before he 
 joined the trek : " We quit this Colony under the full assurance 
 that the English Government has nothing more to require of 
 us, and will allow us to govern ourselves without its inter- 
 ference in the future. We are now leaving the fruitful land 
 of our birth, in which we have suffered enormous losses and 
 continual vexation, and are about to enter a strange and 
 dangerous territory ; but we go with a firm reliance on an 
 all-seeing, just, and merciful God, whom we shall always fear 
 and humbly endeavour to obey." This was high language, 
 yet after-events proved that a steady, consistently fair treat- 
 ment on our part would even then have reconciled these men 
 to a permanent continuance of British sovereignty. Unfortu- 
 nately, our policy oscillated painfully between irritating 
 interference and excessive timidity. First of all attempts 
 were made to stop the trek by force, then to compel the 
 trekkers to return by cutting off their supplies and ammunition, 
 then to throttle their development of the new lands north of 
 the Orange and Vaal Rivers by calling into being fictitious
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 123 
 
 native States on a huge scale in the midst of and around them, 
 then tardily to repair the disastrous effects of this policy ; but 
 not before it had led to open hostilities (1845). Hostilities, 
 however, had this temporarily good result, in that it brought 
 to the front one of the ablest and wisest of the Cape Governors, 
 Sir Harry Smith, who defeated the Boers at Boomplatz in 1848, 
 established what went by the name of the Orange River 
 Sovereignty, and in a year or two secured such good and peace- 
 ful government within its borders as to attract considerable 
 numbers of English and Scotch colonists. The malcontents 
 retired across the Vaal. Then came an abrupt change of 
 policy in the Home Government, a sudden desire actuated 
 mainly by fear of more native wars, to cancel all that was 
 possible of our commitments in South Africa. The Transvaal, 
 by the Sand River Convention, was declared independent in 
 1852, the Orange Free State, by the Convention of Bloem- 
 fontein, in 1854. This was to rush from one extreme to the 
 other. It was as though in 1847 we had erected Quebec into a 
 sovereign State instead of giving it responsible government 
 under the Crown, or as if in 1843 we had been so deeply con- 
 vinced by O'Connell's second agitation for repeal that we had 
 leapt straight from coercive government to the foundation of 
 an independent Republic in Ireland, instead of giving her the 
 kind of Home Rule which she was asking for. 
 
 It was not yet too late to mend. In 1854, when the cession 
 of the Free State had just been carried out, Sir George Grey, 
 whom we have met with in Australia and New Zealand, came 
 as High Commissioner to the Cape. In 1859 he made the 
 proposal I alluded to in the last chapter for federating all the 
 South African States, including the two new Republics. There 
 is little doubt that the scheme was feasible then. The Orange 
 Free State was willing to join, and, indeed, had initiated pro- 
 posals for Federation. Its adhesion would have compeUed the 
 Transvaal, always more hostile to British rule, to come in 
 eventually, if not at once ; for the relations of the two Republics 
 were friendly enough at the time to permit one man, Pretorius, 
 to be President of both States. 
 
 The scheme was rejected by Lord Derby's Tory Cabinet, 
 and Grey, a " dangerous man," as Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial 
 Secretary, dubbed him, was recalled.
 
 124 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Sixteen years later, in 1875, Lord Carnarvon himself, as a 
 member of the Disraeli Ministry, revived the project. Con- 
 verted in his views of the Colonies, like many of his Tory 
 colleagues at this period, he had carried through Parliament 
 the Federation of Canada in 1867, and hoped to do the same 
 with South Africa. But it was too late. The Cape Parliament, 
 now in possession of a responsible Ministry, was hostile, while 
 twenty years of self-government, for the most part under the 
 great President Brand, had changed the sentiments of the 
 Free State. Federation, then, was impossible. On the other 
 hand, the Transvaal was in a state of political unrest and of 
 danger from native aggression, which gave a pretext for 
 reversion to the long-abandoned policy of annexation, and to 
 that extreme Carnarvon promptly went in April, 1877. He 
 took this dangerous course without ascertaining the considered 
 wishes of the majority of the Boers, acting through his emissary, 
 Sir T. Shepstone, on the informal application of a minority of 
 townsmen who honestly wished to come under British rule. 
 
 Rash as the measure was, lasting good might have come of it 
 had the essential stop been taken of preserving representative 
 government. The promise was given and broken. For three 
 years the Assembly, or Volksraad, was not summoned. Once 
 more home statesmanship was blind, and local administration 
 blunderingly oppressive. Shepstone was the wrong man for 
 the post of Administrator. Sir Owen Lanyon, his successor, 
 was an arrogant martinet of the stamp familiar in Canada 
 before 1840, and painfully familiar in Ireland. The refusal of 
 an Assembly naturally strengthened the popular demand for a 
 reversal of the annexation, and this demand, twice pressed in 
 London through a deputation headed by Paul Kruger, obscured 
 the whole issue, and raised a question of British national pride, 
 with all its inevitable consequences, where none need have been 
 raised. There was a moment of hope when Sir Bartle Frere, 
 who stands, perhaps, next to Sir George Grey on the roll of 
 eminent High Commissioners, endeavoured to pacify the Boer 
 malcontents, and drafted the scheme of a liberal Constitution 
 for the Transvaal. But one of the last acts of the Tory 
 Government, at the end of 1879, was to recall Frere for an 
 alleged transgression of his powers in regard to the Zulu War, 
 and to pigeon-hole his scheme. Mr. Gladstone, who in
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 125 
 
 opposition had denounced the annexation with good enough 
 justification, though in terms which under the circumstances 
 were immoderate, found himself compelled to confirm it when 
 he took office in April, 1880. But he, too, allowed the liberal 
 Constitution to sleep in its pigeon-hole. He was assured by 
 the officials on the spot that there was no danger, that the 
 majority were loyal, and only a minority of turbulent dema- 
 gogues disloyal ; and in December, 1880, the rebellion duly 
 broke out, and the Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. What 
 followed we know, war, Laing's Nek, Majuba, and one more 
 violent oscillation of policy in the concession of a virtual 
 independence to the Transvaal. 
 
 Whatever we may think of the policy of this concession, and 
 Lord Morley has made the best case that can be made for 
 Mr. Gladstone's action, it is certain that it was only a fink in 
 a long chain of blunders for which both great political parties 
 had been equally responsible, and of which the end had not 
 yet come. The nation at large, scarcely alive until now to 
 the existence of the Colonies, was stung into Imperial conscious- 
 ness by a national humiliation, for so it was not unnaturally 
 regarded, coming from an obscure pastoral community con- 
 fusedly identified as something between a Colony, a foreign 
 power, and a troublesome native tribe. The history of the 
 previous seventy years in South Africa was either unknown or 
 forgotten, and Mr. Gladstone, who in past years had preached 
 to indifferent hearers the soundest and sanest doctrine of 
 enlightened Imperialism, suddenly appeared, and for ever 
 after remained in the eyes of a great body of his countrymen, 
 as a betrayer of the nation's honour. Resentment was all the 
 greater in that it was universally believed that Laing's Nek and 
 Majuba were unlucky little accidents, and that another month 
 or two of hostilities would have humbled the Boers to the dust. 
 
 This illusion, which is not yet eradicated, and which has 
 coloured all subsequent discussion of the subject, lasted un- 
 modified until the first months of the war in 1899, when events 
 took place exactly similar to Laing's Nek and Majuba, and 
 were followed by a campaign lasting nearly three years, 
 requiring nearly 500,000 men for its completion, and the 
 co-operation of the whole Empire. It is impossible to estimate 
 the course events would have taken in 1881 had the war been
 
 126 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 prolonged. Tf the Free State had joined the Transvaal, it 
 may bo reasonably conjectured that we should have been 
 weaker, relatively, than in 1899. Though the Boers were less 
 numerous, less well organized, and less united as a nation in 
 1881, they were even better shots and stalkers than in 1899, 
 because they had had more recent practice against game and 
 natives ; nor was there a largo British population in the 
 Transvaal to counteract their efforts and supply magnificent 
 corps like the Imperial Light Horse for service in arms against 
 them. Our army, just as brave, was in every other respect, 
 especially in the matter of mounted men and marksmanship, 
 less fitted for such a peculiar campaign, and could have counted 
 with far less certainty upon that assistance from mounted 
 colonial troops without which the war of 1899-1902 could never 
 have been finished at all. Our command of the sea was less 
 secure ; the Egyptian War of 1882 was brewing, and Ireland, 
 where the Great Land Act of 1881 was not yet law, was 
 seething with crime and disorder little distinguishable from 
 war itself, and demanding large bodies of troops. 
 
 If the further course of a war in 1881 is a matter of specula- 
 tion, what we all know for certain is, first, that the conditions 
 which led to war were produced by seventy years of vacillating 
 policy, and, second, that war itself would have been a useless 
 waste of life and treasure, unless success in it had been followed, 
 as in 1906, by the grant of that responsible Government which 
 all along had been the key to the whole difficulty, the condition 
 precedent to a Federal Union of the South African States, and 
 to their closer incorporation in the Empire. 
 
 Few persons realized this at the time. The whole situation 
 changed disastrously for the worse. Arrogance and mutual 
 contempt embittered the relations of the races. Then came a 
 crucial test for the Boer capacity for enlightened and generous 
 statesmanship. Gold was discovered in the Transvaal, and a 
 large British population flocked in. The same problem, with 
 local modifications, faced the Boers as had been faced in Upper 
 and Lower Canada, and for centuries past in Ireland. Were 
 they to trust or suspect, to admit or to exclude from full 
 political rights, the new-comers ? Was it to be the policy of 
 the Duke of Wellington or of the Earl of Durham, of Fitzgibbon 
 or the Volunteers ? They chose the wrong course, and set up
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 127 
 
 an oligarchical ascendancy like the " family compact " of 
 Upper Canada and Nova Scotia. Can we be surprised that 
 they, a rude, backward race, failed under the test where we 
 ourselves, with far less justification, had failed so often ? 
 Their experience of our methods had been bad from first to 
 last. Their latest taste of our rule had been the coercive 
 system of Lanyon, and they feared, with only too good reason, 
 as events after the second war proved, that any concession 
 would lead to a counter-ascendancy of British interests in a 
 country which was legally their own, not a portion of the 
 British dominions. We had suffered nothing, and had no 
 reason to fear anything, from the Irish and French-Canadian 
 Catholics, nor from the Nonconformist Radicals of Upper 
 Canada. It would have been well if a small fraction of the 
 abuse lavished on the tyrannical Boer oligarchy six thousand 
 miles away had been diverted into criticism of the government 
 of a country within sixty miles of our shores, where a large 
 majority of the inhabitants had been for generations asking 
 for the same thing as the Uitlander minority in the Transvaal 
 Home Rule and were stimulated to make that demand by 
 grievances of a kind unknown in the Transvaal. 
 
 But the British blood was up ; the Boer blood was up. 
 Such an atmosphere is not favourable to far-seeing statesman- 
 ship, and it would have taken statesmanship on both sides 
 little short of superhuman to avert another war. The silly 
 raid of 1895 and its condonation by public opinion in England 
 hastened the explosion. Can anyone wonder that public 
 opinion in Ireland was instinctively against that war ? Only 
 a pedant will seize on the supposed paradox that a war for 
 equal rights for white men should have met with reprobation 
 from an Ireland clamouring for Home Rule. Irish experience 
 amply justified Irishmen in suspecting precisely what the 
 Boers suspected, a counter-ascendancy in the gold interest, and 
 in seeing in a war for the conquest of a small independent 
 country by a mighty foreign power an analogy to the original 
 conquest of Ireland by the same power. It is hard to speak 
 with restraint of the educated men men with books and time 
 to read them, with brains and the wealth and leisure to develop 
 them who to this very day abuse their talents in encouraging 
 among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish leaders
 
 128 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, " traitors 
 to the Empire." If wo look at the whole of these events in 
 just perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding 
 principles beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, 
 we shall agree that in some respects Irishmen were better 
 friends to the Empire than the politicians who denounced them, 
 and sounder judges of its needs. Yet there can be no doubt 
 that the Transvaal complications, followed unhappily by the 
 Gordon episode in the Soudan, reacted fatally on Ireland, and 
 that the Irish problem in its turn reacted with bad effect on 
 the Transvaal. When the statesman who refused to avenge 
 Majuba in 1881 proposed his Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 
 and 1893, it was easy for prejudiced minds to associate the 
 two policies as harmonious parts of one great scheme of national 
 dismemberment and betrayal. Boers, Irish, and Soudanese 
 savages, all were confusedly lumped together as dangerous 
 people whom it was England's duty to conquer and coerce. 
 
 The South African War of 1899-1902 came and passed. 
 People will discuss to the end of time whether or not it could 
 have been avoided. Parties will differ to the end of time 
 about its moral justification. For my own part, I think it is 
 pleasanter to dwell on the splendid qualities it evoked in 
 both races, and above all on the mutual respect which replaced 
 the mutual contempt of earlier days. I myself am disposed 
 to think that at the pass matters had reached in 1896 nothing 
 but open war could have set the relations of the two races on a 
 healthy footing. 
 
 But bold and generous statesmanship was needed if the 
 fruits of this mutual respect were to be reaped. The defeated 
 Republics were now British Colonies, their inhabitants British 
 subjects. After many vicissitudes we were back once more 
 in the old political situation of 1836 before the Great Trek, and 
 the policy which was right then was right now. Bitter 
 awakening as it was to our proud people after a war involving 
 such colossal sacrifices, it was still just as true as of old that 
 in Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else, 
 it is utterly impossible for one white democracy to rule another 
 properly on the principle of ascendancy. It was physically 
 possible, thanks to Ireland's proximity, to deny that country 
 Home Rule, but it would not have been even physically possible
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 129 
 
 in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. Yet the idea was 
 conceived and the policy strongly backed which could only 
 have had the disastrous effect of bringing into being two 
 Irelands in the midst of our South African dominions. It is 
 not yet generally recognized that we owe the defeat of this 
 policy in the first instance to Lord Kitchener. From the 
 moment he took the supreme military command in South 
 Africa at the end of 1900, while prosecuting the war with iron 
 severity and sleepless energy, he insisted on and worked for 
 a settlement by consent, with a formal promise of future 
 self-government to the Boers. In this he was in sharp 
 opposition to Lord Milner, who desired to extort an uncon- 
 ditional surrender. Of these two strong, able, high-minded 
 men, the soldier, curiously enough, was the better statesman. 
 In temperament he recalls the General Abercromby of 1797 
 on the eve of the Irish rebellion, still more perhaps General 
 Carleton, who administered French Canada in the critical 
 period after its conquest and during the American War. Lord 
 Milner, in political theory, not in personality, corresponds to 
 Fitzgibbon. His view was that British prestige and authority 
 could only be maintained in the future by thus humbling the 
 national pride of our adversaries, who, moreover, by the 
 formal annexations of 1900, carried into effect when the war 
 was still young, were by a legal fiction rebels, not belligerents. 
 Lord Kitchener, besides seeing, as the responsible soldier in 
 the field, the sheer physical impossibility of lowering the Boer 
 national pride by any military operations he had the power 
 to undertake, from the beginning of the guerilla war onwards, 
 was a truer judge of human nature and a better Imperialist 
 at heart in realizing that the self-respect of the Boers was a 
 precious asset, not a dangerous menace to the Empire, and 
 that the whole fate of South Africa depended on a racial 
 reconciliation on the basis of equal political rights, which 
 would be for ever precluded by compelling the Boers to pass 
 under the Caudine Forks. 
 
 Fortunately Lord Kitchener was supported by the Home 
 Government, and the Peace of Vereeniging took the form of 
 a surrender on terms, or, virtually, of a treaty, formally guaran- 
 teeing, among other things, the concession " when circum- 
 stances should permit " of " representative institutions leading 
 
 9
 
 130 
 
 up to self-government." The next ordeal of British statesman- 
 ship came when the time arrived in 1905 to redeem this promise. 
 There were two distinctly defined alternatives : one, to profit 
 by experience and to give responsible government at once ; 
 the other, for the time being, to copy one of the constitutional 
 models which had long been obsolete curiosities in the history 
 of all the white Colonies, which had never failed to produce 
 mischievous results, whether in a bi-racial or a uni-racial 
 community, and which were in reality suited only to groups 
 of officials and traders living in the midst of uneducated 
 coloured races in tropical lands. The Government, and we 
 cannot doubt that their traditional policy toward Ireland 
 warped their views, declared for the latter alternative, and 
 issued under Letters Patent a Constitution which happily 
 never came into force. Like the Act of Union with Ireland, 
 it gave the shadow of freedom without the substance. It set 
 up a single Legislative Chamber, four-fifths elective, but con- 
 taining, as ex-officio members, the whole of the Executive 
 Council as nominated by the Crown. Executive power, there- 
 fore, together with the last word in all legislation, was to remain 
 wholly in the hands of the Crown, acting through a Ministry 
 not responsible to the people's representatives. It would have 
 been difficult to design a plan more certain to promote friction, 
 racialism, and an eventual deadlock, necessitating either a 
 humiliating surrender by the Government under pressure of the 
 refusal of supplies, or a reversion to despotic government 
 which would have produced another war. With wide differ- 
 ences of detail and with the added risk of financial deadlock, 
 it was sought to establish the kind of political situation 
 prevalent in Ireland after the Act of Union. The executive 
 power in that country, and, with the exception of the Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture, the policy and personnel of the host of 
 nominated Boards through which its affairs are administered, 
 still stand wholly outside popular control, while legislation 
 in accordance with Irish views is only possible when, in the 
 fluctuation of the British party balance, a British Ministry 
 happens to be in sympathy with these views, and only too often 
 not even then. 
 
 Statesmen who looked with complacency on the history of 
 a century in Ireland under such a system naturally took a
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 131 
 
 similar view of the Transvaal, deriving it from the same low 
 estimate of human tendencies. The literature, despatches, 
 and speeches of the period carry us straight back to the 
 Canadian controversies of 1837-1840, and beyond them to the 
 Union controversy of 1800. In one respect the parallel with 
 the Irish Union is closer, because, while British opinion in 
 Lower Canada was predominantly against responsible govern- 
 ment, there was in Ireland a strong current of unbribed Pro- 
 testant opinion against the Union. Similarly, in the Transvaal, 
 there was a strong feeling among a section of the British 
 population, coinciding with the general wishes of the Dutch 
 population, in favour of full responsible government. In 
 other words, the mere prospect of self-government lessened 
 racial cleavage, brought men of the two races together, and 
 began the evolution of a new party cleavage on the normal 
 lines natural to modern communities. The whole question 
 was keenly canvassed at public meetings and in the Press from 
 November, 1904, to February 5, 1905, and in Johannesburg a 
 British party of considerable strength took the lead in demand- 
 ing the fuller political rights, and formed the Responsible 
 Government Association. The controversy was embodied in 
 a Blue-Book laid before Parliament,* and at every stage of its 
 progress the facts were cabled home by Lord Milner to the 
 Government, who thus had the whole situation before them 
 when they came to their decision. 
 
 It would be worth the reader's while to study with some care 
 the terms of the despatch announcing that decision. f He 
 will feel himself in contact with fundamental principles, un- 
 disturbed by individual bias ; for no one could suspect Mr. 
 Lyttelton, the genial and popular Secretary of State who 
 penned the despatch, of any violent prejudices. Yet the 
 spirit of the whole despatch, though gentle and persuasive in 
 its terms, is the spirit of Fitzgibbon's brutally outspoken 
 argument for the extinction of the Irish Parliament, and the 
 complete exclusion of Irish Roman Catholics from influence 
 over their country's affairs. The despatch begins, it is true, 
 by explaining that the proposed Constitution is only intended 
 to be temporary ; that it had been the invariable custom to 
 grant freedom to the Colonies by degrees, and that the custom 
 * Cd. 2479, 1905. f Cd. 2400, 1905.
 
 132 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 must bo followed ; but the reasons adduced for following it, if 
 we consider that they were adduced in the year 1905, instead 
 of a century and a half back, constitute one of the strangest 
 of all the strange inversions of historical cause and effect 
 which a Home Rule controversy has ever suggested to the 
 human brain. Instead of inferring from our bitter experiences 
 in Upper and Lower Canada, which are mentioned in the 
 despatch, and in Ireland, which is not, that race distinctions 
 increase instead of lessening the necessity for responsible 
 government, Mr. Lyttelton complacently quotes bi-racial 
 Lower Canada as a precedent for his Transvaal Constitution. 
 Quite frankly, though in curiously misleading terms,* he 
 records the fact that a similar Constitution there led to dead- 
 lock and rebellion. Without intention to deceive, he ignores 
 the fact that wholly British Upper Canada reached the same 
 pass for the same reasons ; and he appears to look forward 
 with equanimity to the passage of the unfortunate Transvaal 
 through an identically painful phase of history toward the 
 
 * " It is true that in the case of Canada full responsible government was 
 conceded, a few years after a troublous period culminating in a brief armed 
 rising, to a population composed of races then not very friendly to each other, 
 though now long since happily reconciled. But the Canadas had by that 
 time enjoyed representative institutions for over fifty years, the French- 
 Canadians had since the year 1763 been continuously British subjects, and 
 the disorders which preceded Lord Durham's Mission and the subsequent 
 grant of self-government could not compare in any way with a war like that 
 of 1899-1902. It is also the fact that in the United Colony of Upper and 
 Lower Canada, during the period of 1840-1867, parties were formed mainly upon 
 the lines of races, and that, as the representatives of the races were in number 
 nearly balanced, stability of Government was not attained, a difficulty which 
 was not overcome until the Federation of 1867, accompanied by the relega- 
 tion of provincial affairs to provincial Legislatures, placed the whole political 
 Constitution of Canada upon a wider basis." 
 
 Few would gather from the first sentence that the races were " not very 
 friendly to each other " precisely because they lived under a coercive political 
 system; and that, in the long-run, they were "happily reconciled" because 
 they received responsible government. Nor could it be deduced from the 
 obscure reference lower down to the union of the two Provinces that the 
 Union was the one blot upon Durham's scheme, the one point in which, 
 fearing the predominance of a French majority in Lower Canada, he 
 shrank from his own principles and recommended an unworkable Union 
 which tended to encourage the formation "of parties on the lines of races." 
 From the further allusion to the Federal Union of 1867, no one would 
 imagine that that great scheme was founded on a cessation of racial antipathy 
 inside the Quebec Province, and on a voluntary recognition among all races 
 and parties that it was best for that Province to have a local autonomy of its 
 own, parallel with that of the Ontario Province and under the supreme 
 central authority of the Dominion.
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 133 
 
 same sanguinary climax. The radical error in the official 
 version of events in Canada appears in the comparison between 
 the rebellions of 1837 and the South African War of 1899-1902. 
 To contrast the " brief armed rising " in Canada with the three 
 years' war in South Africa, and to argue that a degree of free- 
 dom could safely be given after the former, which would 
 involve great danger after the latter, was to show ignorance of 
 the chain of historical events and blindness to their true moral. 
 The underlying idea is the one applied to the old American 
 Colonies and for centuries to Ireland, namely, that the more 
 mutinous a dependency is, the less reason for giving it Home 
 Rule, with the paradoxical corollary applied even to this day 
 in Ireland, that if it is not disorderly it does not need Home 
 Rule. So from age to age statesmen run their heads against 
 facts, perpetuate the errors of their forefathers, and do their 
 unconscious best to intensify the evils they deplore. It was 
 erroneous to regard either the Canadian Rebellions or the Boer 
 War as events which rendered responsible government more or 
 less dangerous. Each of these events was itself the climax of a 
 long period of irresponsible misgovernment dating from about 
 the same period, the second decade of the nineteenth century, 
 and demanding the same remedy. In the Boer case, continuity 
 was twice broken by grants of independence, and the climax 
 proportionally delayed, but the origin of the trouble was the 
 same. If the Boers had not trekked en masse from Cape 
 Colony in order to escape from misgovernment, both move- 
 ments in the Cape and Canada might have come to a head 
 in exactly the same year, 1837. 
 
 In sober, weighty, tactful phrases, carefully chosen to avoid 
 giving needless offence to the Dutch, the despatch laboriously 
 overthrows the Liberal theory of government, and works out 
 the negation of all Imperial experience. It deplores the 
 " bitter memories " of war, which free institutions, by tending 
 to " emphasize and stereotype the racial line," will make 
 more, not less bitter, and which can be effaced only by the 
 " healing effect of time." We think of the Durham Report, of 
 Ireland, and marvel. We recollect the bulky Blue-Book at Mr. 
 Lyttelton's elbow as he wrote, full of speeches and articles by 
 Englishmen, showing quite correctly, as has since been proved, 
 that the " racial line " in Johannesburg was growing fainter
 
 134 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 daily with the mere prospect of responsible government. 
 These men were not afraid of the Dutch, and said so. The 
 answer was that they ought to be, or, in the persuasive 
 language of diplomacy, as follows : 
 
 "His Majesty's Government trust that those of British 
 origin in the Transvaal who, with honest conviction, have 
 advocated the immediate concession of full responsible govern- 
 ment, will recognize the soundness and cogency of the reasons, 
 both in their own interests and in those of the Empire, for 
 proceeding more cautiously and slowly, and that under a 
 political system which admittedly has its difficulties they will, 
 notwithstanding a temporary disappointment, do their best 
 to promote the welfare of the country and the smooth working 
 of its institutions." 
 
 Then came a chivalrous compliment to the Dutch for their 
 " gallant struggle " in the war, coupled with a reminder that 
 they are not to be trusted with political power, a reminder 
 so courteously worded that it, too, becomes a compliment : 
 
 " The inhabitants of Dutch origin have recently witnessed, 
 after their gallant struggle against superior power, the fall 
 of the Republic founded by the valour and sufferings of their 
 ancestors, and cannot be expected, until time has done more 
 to heal the wound, to entertain the most cordial feelings 
 towards the Government of the Transvaal. But from them 
 also, as from a people of practical genius, who have learned by 
 long experience to make the best of circumstances, His 
 Majesty's Government expect co-operation in the task of 
 making their race, no longer in isolated independence, a strong 
 pillar in the fabric of a world- wide Empire. That this should 
 be the result, and that a complete reconciliation between men 
 of two great and kindred races should, under the leading of 
 Divine Providence, speedily come to pass, is the ardent desire 
 of His Majesty the King and of His Majesty's Govern- 
 ment." 
 
 The tone recalls the tone of Pitt and Castlereagh in proposing 
 the Union. But Fitzgibbon went more directly to the point 
 in saying outright that, Ireland having been conquered and 
 confiscated, the colonists " were at the mercy of the old 
 inhabitants of the island," and that laws must be framed by an 
 external power to " meet the vicious propensities of human
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 135 
 
 nature." Let us recognize unreservedly that the words of 
 the Transvaal despatch were the outcome of deep and sincere 
 conviction. That is the worst of it. From age to age Ireland 
 has to suffer for the depth and sincerity of these convictions. 
 There, too, the cleavage of race and religion, never complete, 
 always defying the official efforts to " stereotype and emphasize 
 it," to quote the despatch of 1905, grows fainter with time, 
 and will grow fainter as long as the national movement lives to 
 draw men together in the common interest of Ireland. The 
 Volunteers, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, many of the Young Irelanders, 
 Isaac Butt, Parnell, were Protestants. And there is a strong 
 band of Protestant Home Rulers to-day in Ulster and out of 
 it, landlords, tenants, capitalists, labourers, Members of Par- 
 liament, and clergymen, who declare that they are not afraid 
 of Catholic oppression, and who are told by Unionists that they 
 ought to be. And in Ireland, too, the Roman Catholic 
 majority are told, rarely, it is true, in the courteous phrases 
 of Mr. Lyttelton's despatch, that they " cannot be expected 
 to entertain the most cordial feelings towards the Govern- 
 ment." In Ireland, also, is a " political system which 
 admittedly has its difficulties," ironical euphemism for a 
 system whose analogue in the Transvaal could have been used 
 by the subject race, had they so willed, to bring civil govern- 
 ment to a standstill, without the means of furnishing anything 
 better, and which under the Act of Union can be, and has been, 
 used to dislocate the Parliamentary life of the United Kingdom. 
 The Boers were asked " as a people of practical genius " to 
 assist the " smooth working " of an unworkable Constitution, 
 so as to promote the " reconciliation of two great and kindred 
 races." The Irish are pursued with invective for legitimately 
 using the constitutional power given them in order, while 
 freeing Parliament from an intolerable incubus, to gain the right 
 to elicit character and responsibility in themselves by shoulder- 
 ing their own burdens and saving their own souls. 
 
 If the official view of the Transvaal was mistaken, the summit 
 of error was reached in the view taken of the Orange River 
 Colony. In that Colony, which was almost wholly pastoral 
 and Dutch, and which until the war had enjoyed free insti- 
 tutions uninterruptedly for half a century, and had made 
 remarkably good use of them, representative government,
 
 136 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 even of the illusory kind designed for the Transvaal, was to 
 be indefinitely postponed, postponed at any rate until the 
 results of the " experiment " in the Transvaal had been 
 observed. 
 
 The Government " recognize that there are industrial and 
 economic conditions peculiar to the Transvaal, which make 
 it very desirable in that Colony to have at the earliest possible 
 date some better means of ascertaining the views of the 
 different sections of the population than the present system 
 affords. The question as regards the Orange River Colony 
 being a less urgent one, it appears to them that there will be 
 advantage in allowing a short period to intervene before 
 elective representative institutions are granted to the last- 
 named Colony, because this will permit His Majesty's Govern- 
 ment to observe the experiment, and, if need be, to profit by 
 the experience so gained." 
 
 What is the train of reasoning in this strange specimen of 
 political argument ? It was important to " ascertain the 
 views " of the bi-racial Transvaal, but needless to ascertain 
 the views of the practically homogeneous Orange River 
 Colony. The " question " there is a " less urgent one." 
 What question ? Why less urgent ? Is it that the British 
 minority, being so very small, is more liable to oppression 
 by the Dutch ? That is a tenable point, though by parity 
 of reasoning it would seem to make the question more, not 
 less, urgent, and the importance of " ascertaining the views " 
 of the different sections of the population, greater, not less. 
 Or is it the diametrically opposite train of thought, namely, 
 that an assumed improbability of disorder owing to the 
 homogeneity of the population is a reason, not for giving Home 
 Rule, but for withholding it ? These contradictions and 
 confusions are painfully familiar in anti-Home Rule dialectics 
 all over the world. A quiet Ireland does not want Home 
 Rule ; a turbulent Ireland is not fit for it. If the Unionist 
 element in Ireland is strong, that is clearly an argument for 
 withholding Home Rule in deference to the wishes of a strong 
 minority. If the minority, on the other hand, is proved to be 
 small, all the greater reason for withholding it, because oppres- 
 sion by the majority will be easier. So the sterile argument 
 swings back and forth, and men still talk of " experiments "
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 137 
 
 and " profiting by experience," while the demonstration of 
 their errors is written in the blood and tears of centuries, and 
 while masses of facts accumulate, demonstrating the great 
 truth that free democratic government, whatever its dis- 
 advantages and dangers and it has both is the best resource 
 for uniting, strengthening, and enriching a community of 
 white men. 
 
 The Transvaal Constitution of 1905 was cancelled on the 
 incoming of the Liberal Ministry at the end of that year, and 
 in the following year full responsible government was granted 
 both to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, with the 
 results that we know. Instantaneously there permeated the 
 bi-racial urban society in the Transvaal a new sense of brother- 
 hood. Men of different race, as far apart in spirit as the 
 members of the Kildare Street Club, the Orange Societies, and 
 the Ancient Order of Hibernians, met and made friends because 
 it was not only natural but necessary to make friends, since on 
 all alike lay the burden of doing their best for their country 
 on a basis of equal citizenship. Nobody out there called the 
 new system an " experiment." The wrench once over, the 
 thing once done, there was general unanimity that whatever 
 the difficulties and there were great difficulties it was the 
 right thing to be done under the circumstances, and if this 
 unanimity was combined, rightly or wrongly, with a good deal 
 of resentment against the Liberal attitude at home towards 
 Chinese labour, nobody is any the worse for that. The day 
 will come when even that burning question will be seen in its 
 true perspective as an infinitesimally small point beside the 
 great principle of responsible government, which includes the 
 decision of labour questions, together with all other branches 
 of domestic policy. 
 
 Conservative opinion at home has been slower to change 
 than British opinion in the Transvaal. But, again, this was 
 natural. Parties had long been divided on the South African 
 question. The abrupt reversal of policy was felt as a humilia- 
 tion, and the ingrained mental habits engendered by the tradi- 
 tional policy towards Ireland yielded slowly, grudgingly, and 
 fearfully to the proof of error in South Africa. It is not for 
 the sake of opening an old wound, but solely because it is ab- 
 solutely necessary for the completion of my argument, that
 
 138 
 
 I have to recall the angry and violent speeches which followed 
 the announcement of the new policy ; the dogmatic prognosti- 
 cations of Imperial disruption, of financial collapse, and of a 
 cruel Boer tyranny in the emancipated Colonies ; the charges 
 of wanton betrayal of loyalists, of disgraceful surrender to 
 " the enemy." Some of the leading actors in these scenes, 
 notably Mr. Balfour and Mr. Lyttelton, have since acknow- 
 ledged that they were wrong, while apparently feeling it their 
 duty as honourable and loyal men to give a somewhat mis- 
 leading turn to an old controversy in their praise of Lord 
 Milner's services to South Africa. That Lord Milner, in his 
 administration during and after the war, did, indeed, do a vast 
 amount of sound and lasting work for South Africa is perfectly 
 true, and he deserves all honour for it. Probably no public 
 servant of the Empire ever laboured in its service with more 
 unstinted devotion and a higher sense of duty. But good 
 administration is not an adequate substitute for knowledge 
 of men, and that knowledge Lord Milner lacked. He did no 
 service to the British colonists of South Africa in telling them 
 that they had been shamefully betrayed by the Home Govern- 
 ment in 1906. It would have been wiser to advise them to 
 rely on themselves and on the justice and wisdom of their 
 Dutch fellow-citizens. His violent speeches in 1906-1908 about 
 the calamitous results of permitting Dutch influences free play 
 in South Africa speeches breathing the essential spirit of 
 Fitzgibbonism would have wrought incalculable mischief had 
 they coincided with effective British policy ; while his view, 
 as expressed in the House of Lords, * that a preparatory regime 
 of benevolent despotism, showing " the obvious solicitude of 
 the Government for the welfare of the people," and taking 
 shape " in a hundred and one works of material advancement," 
 would " win us friends and diminish our enemies," evinces 
 an ignorance of the ordinary motives influencing the conduct 
 of white men, which would be incredible if we had not Irish 
 experience before us. " Twenty years of resolute govern- 
 ment," said Lord Salisbury. " Home Rule will be killed by 
 kindness," said many of his successors. In later chapters I 
 shall have to show what well-meant kindness and resolute 
 government have done for Ireland. If even at this late hour 
 * February 26, March 27, 1906.
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 139 
 
 Lord Milner would frankly acknowledge his error, I believe he 
 would enormously enhance his reputation in the eyes of the 
 whole Empire. 
 
 As practical men, let us remember that the Constitutions of 
 1906 would not have become law if, instead of being issued 
 under Letters Patent, they had had to pass through Parliament 
 in the form of a Bill. The whole Conservative party, following 
 Lord Milner, was vehemently against the Letters Patent. 
 Those who witnessed the debate upon them in the House of 
 Commons will not forget the scene. I recall this fact without 
 any desire to entangle myself in the current controversy 
 about the Upper House, but with the strictly practical object 
 of showing that because a Home Rule Bill is defeated in Parlia- 
 ment, as the Irish Bills of 1886 and 1893 were defeated, it 
 does not necessarily follow that its policy is wrong. Nor 
 does it follow that its policy is wrong if that defeat in Parlia- 
 ment is confirmed by a General Election. Home Rule for 
 Canada never had to pass, and would not have passed even the 
 Parliamentary test. Skilful and determined organization could 
 have wrecked even the Australian Constitutions. No one, cer- 
 tainly, could have guaranteed a favourable result of a General 
 Election taken expressly upon the Transvaal and Orange River 
 Constitutions of 1906, with the whole machinery of one of the 
 great parties thrown into the scale against them. We know 
 the case made against Ireland on such occasions, and the 
 case against the conquered Republics was made in Parliament 
 with ten times greater force. If anyone doubts this, let him 
 compare the speeches on Ireland in 1886 and 1893 with the 
 speeches on South Africa in 1905-06. With the alteration of a 
 name or two, with the substitution, for example, of Johannes- 
 burg for Ulster, the speeches against South African and Irish 
 Home Rule might be almost interchangeable. For electioneer- 
 ing purposes, evidences, in word and act, of Boer treason, 
 rapacity, and vindictiveness, could have been made by skilful 
 orators to seem damning and unanswerable. All the arts for 
 inflaming popular passion under the pretext of " patriotism " 
 would have been used, and we know that patriotism some- 
 times assumes strange disguises. The material would have 
 been rich and easily accessible. Instead of having to ransack 
 ancient numbers of Irish or American newspapers for incautious
 
 140 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 phrases dropped by Mr. Redmond or Mr. O'Brien in moments 
 of unusual provocation, the speeches of Botha, Steyn, and 
 De Wet, during the war, and even at the Peace Conference, 
 would have been ready for the hoardings and the fly-sheets, 
 and they would have had an appreciable effect. 
 
 Am I weakening the case for democracy itself in pressing 
 this view ? Surely not. One democracy is incapable of 
 understanding the domestic needs and problems of another. 
 Whenever, therefore, a democracy finds itself responsible for 
 the adjudication of a claim for Home Rule from white men, 
 it should limit itself to ascertaining whether the claim is 
 genuine and sincere. If it is, the claim should be granted, 
 and a Constitution constructed in friendly concert with the 
 men who are to live under it. That way lies safety and honour, 
 and, happily, the democracy is being educated to that truth. 
 If this be a counsel of perfection ; if the difficult and delicate 
 task of settling the details of Irish Home Rule is to be ham- 
 pered and complicated by the resuscitation of those time- 
 honoured discussions over abstract principles which ought 
 long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let every patriotic 
 and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten and 
 mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations, 
 and to substitute reason for passion. 
 
 The grant of responsible government to the Transvaal 
 and Orange River Colony reacted with amazing rapidity on 
 South African politics as a whole. It took the Canadian 
 Provinces twenty-seven years (if we reckon from 1840), and the 
 Australian States forty-five years (if we reckon from 1855), 
 to reach a Federal Union. Hardly a minute was wasted in 
 South Africa. Under very able guidance, the scheme was 
 canvassed almost from the first, and in two years trusted 
 leaders of both races, representing Natal, Cape Colony, and 
 two newly emancipated Colonies men, some of whom had 
 been shooting at one another only five years before were 
 sitting at a table together hammering out the details of a 
 South African Union. Here, indeed, was shown the " prac- 
 tical genius " which the Government of 1905 had piously 
 invoked for their abortive Constitution. In the spirit of for- 
 bearance, of sympathy, of wise compromise, which governed 
 the proceedings of this famous Conference, was to be found
 
 141 
 
 the measure of the longing of all parties to extinguish racialism 
 and make South Africa truly a nation. The Imperial Act 
 legalizing the arrangements ultimately arrived at by the agree- 
 ment of the colonists was passed in 1909. The political system 
 constructed cannot be called Federal. The framers rejected 
 the Australian model, and went much beyond the Canadian 
 model hi centralizing authority and diminishing local auto- 
 nomy ; nor can there be any doubt that the strongest motive 
 behind that policy was that of securing the harmony of the 
 two white races. 
 
 All this was the result of trusting the Dutch in 1906. " We 
 cannot expect you to trust us, and we shall not trust you," 
 said the despatch of 1905. We know what the consequences 
 of that policy would have been. It is not a question of imagina- 
 tion or hypothesis. It is a question of the operation of certain 
 unchanging laws in the conduct of all white men. Good or 
 bad, our government would have been detested. We should 
 have manufactured sedition, lawlessness, and discord. Then 
 the tendency would have been strong to follow the old Irish 
 precedent, and make the evil symptoms we had ourselves 
 educed the pretext for tightening the screw of anti-popular 
 government. It would have been said that we must sustain 
 our prestige to the end and at all costs, a phrase which often 
 cloaks the obstinacy of moral cowardice. Or, too late to 
 escape the contempt of the Boers, we might have abruptly 
 surrendered to clamour. It would have taken a long time 
 to reach union then. Contempt is a bad foundation. 
 
 It brings one near despair to see the Union of South Africa 
 used by men who should know better as an argument against 
 Irish Home Rule. The chain of causation is so clear, one 
 would think, as to be incapable of misconstruction. But 
 there seems to be no limit in certain minds to the prejudice 
 against the principle of Home Rule. If it is seen to work well, 
 the phenomenon is hurriedly swept into oblivion, and its 
 results attributed with feverish ingenuity to any cause but the 
 true one. The very speed with which the antidote pervades 
 the body politic and expels the old poison helps these un- 
 tiring propagators of error to suppress the history of recupera- 
 tion, and to ascribe the cure of the patient to a treat- 
 ment which, if applied long enough, would have killed him.
 
 142 
 
 The Conservative party appear to have now reached this 
 amazing conclusion : that they and Lord Milner were the 
 authors of the South African Union, and that that Union is 
 a weapon sent them by Providence for combating the Irish 
 claims. This is what Ireland has to pay for being the sport 
 of British parties. Individual statesmen may point at past 
 mistakes ; but a party, as a party, can never admit error : it 
 is against the rules. To make things easier, there is that 
 question-begging phrase, the " Union." If South Africa, like 
 Australia, had been federalized, this windfall would have been 
 lost, because the word " Federal " might have suggested some 
 form of Federal Home Rule for Ireland. Labels mean an 
 enormous amount in politics. 
 
 There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Walter Long, and 
 even Lord Selborne, who, as High Commissioner, actually 
 witnessed the whole evolution from responsible government 
 in the two conquered States to the Union of South Africa, 
 are perfectly sincere in their opposition to Irish Home Rule. 
 But, I would respectfully suggest, it is their duty to use their 
 knowledge and convictions in the right and fair way. Let 
 them say, if they will, ignoring the intermediate and indis- 
 pensable phase of Home Rule in South Africa : " Here are two 
 Unions ; never mind how they arose. Both are good : all 
 Unions are good. The modern tendency to unify is sound ; 
 do not let us react to devolution." Let them, in other words, 
 confine then* argument to the domain of political science. 
 What, I submit, they should refrain from, is the imputation of 
 sordid motives to Nationalist leaders, the prognostications of 
 religious and racial tyranny hi Ireland, and all those inflamma- 
 tory arguments against the principle of Home Rule which 
 have been used all the world over, from time immemorial, 
 for the maintenance of Unions based on legal, not on moral, 
 ties, which were used against responsible government for the 
 Transvaal, and which, I venture to affirm, degrade our public 
 life. 
 
 I am assuming for the moment that most Conservatives 
 will elect to use the South African parallel in the way that 
 Mr. Long and Lord Selborne have used it, that is, while 
 tacitly approving in retrospect of the Home Rule of 1906, to 
 argue from Union to Union. But it is of no use to blink the
 
 SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 143 
 
 fact that there are pessimists who will put forward an anti- 
 thetical case, boldly declaring that we were wrong ever to trust 
 the Boers, that racialism is as bad as ever, that General Botha's 
 loyalty is cant, the Cullinan diamond an insult, and that 
 South Africa will go from bad to worse under a Dutch tyranny. 
 Party propaganda is quite elastic enough to permit the two 
 opposite views to be used to convince the same electorate at 
 the same election. Pessimists are always active in these 
 affairs, and they can always produce something in the nature 
 of a plausible case, because it stands to reason that the evils 
 of generations cannot be swept away in a moment, either in 
 South Africa or Ireland. Miracles do not happen, and the 
 pessimists, who are the curse of Ireland to-day, will be able 
 to demonstrate with ease that the free Ireland of to-morrow 
 will not enter instantaneously upon a millennium. It is useless 
 to attempt to convert these extremists. For a century back, 
 Hansard and the columns of daily papers have been full of their 
 unfulfilled jeremiads about Canada, about Australia, and about 
 the very smallest and most tardy attempts to give a little respon- 
 sibility to the majority of citizens in Ireland. The vocabulary of 
 impending ruin has been exhausted long ago ; there is nothing 
 new to be said. But those who care to study in a cool temper 
 the course of recent South African politics in the columns of 
 the Times, or, better still, in those of that excellent magazine 
 for the discussion of Imperial affairs, the Bound Table, will 
 conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards 
 racial reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens 
 South Africa. The settlement, by friendly compromise at 
 the end of the last session, of the very thorny question of 
 language in the education of children, is a good example of 
 what good- will can accomplish under free institutions. By a 
 laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled from 
 the utterances of exceptionally vehement partisans, it would 
 be still possible to make up a theory of the " disloyalty " of 
 the South African Dutch. It would have been equally pos- 
 sible for a painstaking British student of the Sydney Bulletin 
 within recent memory to start a panic over the imminent 
 " loss " of Australia. Some people think that Canada is as 
 good as " lost " now. Yet the Empire has never been so strong 
 or so united as to-day.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ANALOGY 
 
 LET the reader endeavour to see the closely related stories of 
 Ireland and of these more distant communities as a whole, 
 undistracted by the varying degrees of their proximity to the 
 Mother Country, making his study one of men and laws, and 
 remembering that Ireland was the first and nearest of the 
 British Colonies. Does not she become a convex mirror, in 
 which, swollen to unnatural proportions, the mistakes of two 
 centuries are reflected ? Principles of government universal 
 in their nature, transcending geography, and painfully evolved 
 in more distant parts of the Empire, we have thrown to the 
 winds in Ireland. Economic evils, resembling, in however 
 distant a degree, those of Ireland, have irritated and retarded 
 every community in which they have been allowed to take 
 root. A sound agrarian system has been the primary need of 
 every country. To take the closest parallel, if absentee pro- 
 prietorship and insecurity of tenure kept little Prince Edward 
 Island, peacefully and legally settled, backward and disturbed 
 for a century, it is not surprising that Ireland, submitted to 
 confiscation, the Penal Code, and commercial ruin, did not 
 flourish under a land system beside which that of Prince 
 Edward Island was a paradise. Tardy redress of the worst 
 Irish abuses is no defence of the system which created them 
 and sustained them with such ruinous results. No white com- 
 munity of pride and spirit would willingly tolerate the grotesque 
 form of Crown Colony administration, founded on force, and 
 now tempered by a kind of paternal State Socialism, under 
 which Ireland lives to-day. Unionism for Ireland is anti- 
 Imperialist. Its upholders strenuously opposed colonial 
 autonomy, and but yesterday were passionately opposing 
 South African autonomy. To-day colonial autonomy is 
 
 144
 
 THE ANALOGY 145 
 
 an axiom. But Ireland is a measure of the depth of these 
 convictions. There would be no Empire to idealize if their 
 Irish principles had been applied just a little longer to any 
 of the oversea States which constitute the self-governing 
 Colonies of to-day. As it is, these principles have wrought 
 great and perhaps lasting mischief which, in the righteous 
 glow of self-congratulation upon what we are accustomed to 
 call our constructive political genius, we are too apt to over- 
 look. It was bad for America to pass through that phase of 
 agitation and discord which preceded the revolutionary war. 
 It was demoralizing for the Canadas to be driven into rebellion 
 by the vices of ascendancy government. Mr. Gladstone, 
 speaking of Australian autonomy, was right in satirizing the 
 "miserable jargon" about fitting men for political privileges, 
 and in demonstrating the harm done by withholding those 
 privileges. And the Irish race all over the world, fine race as 
 it is, would be finer still if Ireland had been free. 
 
 The political habits formed in dealing with Ireland have 
 disastrously influenced Imperial policy in the past. Cannot 
 we, by a supreme national effort, reverse the mental process, 
 and, if we have always failed in the past to learn from Irish 
 lessons how not to treat the Colonies, at any rate learn, even 
 at the eleventh hour, from our colonial lessons how to treat 
 Ireland ? Must we for ever sound the old alarms about 
 " disloyalty " and " dismemberment " and "abandonment of 
 the loyal minority to the tender mercies of their foes "; 
 phrases as old as the Stamp Act of 1765 ? Must we carry 
 the " gentle art of making enemies," practised to the last point 
 of danger in the Colonies, to the preposterous pitch of estranging 
 men at our very doors, while pluming ourselves on the friend- 
 ship of peoples 12,000 miles away ? These are anxious times. 
 We have a mighty rival in Europe, and we need the co-opera- 
 tion of all our hands and brains. On a basis of mere profit 
 and loss, is it sensible to maintain a system in Ireland which 
 weakens both Ireland and the whole United Kingdom, clogs 
 the delicate machinery of Parliamentary government, and, 
 worked out in hard figures of pounds, shillings, and pence, 
 has ceased even to show a pecuniary advantage ? 
 
 Have Unionists really no better prescription for the con- 
 stitutional difficulties caused by the Union than to reduce 
 
 10
 
 140 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the representation of Ireland in Parliament so as to give 
 Ireland still less control than at present over her own affairs ? 
 Is that seriously their last word in statesmanship, to exas- 
 perate Nationalist Ireland without even providing in any 
 appreciable degree a mechanical remedy for disordered poli- 
 tical functions ? The idea has only to be stated to be 
 dismissed. It is not even practical politics. Some things are 
 sheer impossibilities ; and to leave the Union system as it is, 
 while reducing representation, is one of them. 
 
 We revert, then, to a contemplation of the well-tried ex- 
 pedient, " Trust, and you will be trusted." But then we have 
 to meet pessimists of two descriptions, the honest and the 
 merely cynical. The honest pessimist (often, unhappily, an 
 educated Irishman) says : " The Irish in Ireland are an in- 
 curably criminal race. They differ from Irishmen elsewhere 
 and from Anglo-Saxons everywhere. Air and soil are un- 
 accountable. The Union policy has been, and remains, a 
 painful but a quite inevitable necessity. It is sound, now and 
 for all time." The cynical pessimist, on the other hand, 
 admits the errors of past policy, but says frankly that it is too 
 late to change. " We have gone too far, raised passions we 
 cannot allay." I shall not try further to confute the 
 honest pessimist. The preceding chapters have been written 
 in vain if they do not shatter the theory of original sin. And 
 to the cynical pessimist, who is a reincarnation of our old 
 friend Fitzgibbon (for that clear-headed statesman frankly 
 imputed original sin to the conquerors of Ireland, as well as to 
 the conquered), I would only say : " Use your common sense." 
 These panics over the vagaries and excesses of an Irish Parlia- 
 ment, always groundless, are beginning to look highly ridicu- 
 lous. In 1893, when the last Home Rule Bill was being 
 discussed, a Franco-Irish alliance was the fear. Now it is the 
 other way, and the Spectator has been writing solemn articles 
 to warn its readers that Mr. Dillon, in a speech on foreign 
 policy, has shown ominous signs of hostility to France. In 
 the election of January, 1910, an ex-Cabinet Minister informed 
 the public that Home Rule meant the presence of a German 
 fleet in Belfast Lough at whose invitation he did not explain, 
 though he probably did not intend to insult Ulster. This 
 wild talk has not even the merit of a strategical foundation.
 
 THE ANALOGY 147 
 
 It belongs to another age. Ireland has neither a fleet nor the 
 will or money to build one. Our fleet, in which large numbers 
 of Irishmen serve, guarantees the security of New Zealand, 
 and if it cannot maintain the command of home waters, in- 
 cluding St. George's Channel, our situation is desperate, 
 whether Ireland is friendly or hostile. We guarantee the in- 
 dependent existence of the kingdom of Belgium, which is as 
 near as Ireland, with military liabilities vastly more serious 
 than any which Ireland could conceivably entail ; but we do 
 not claim, as a consequence, to control the Executive of 
 Belgium and remove her Parliament to Westminster, in order 
 to be quite sure that the Belgians are not intriguing against us 
 with Germany. Germany, our alarmists fear, is to invade 
 Ireland, and Ireland is to greet the invaders with open arms. 
 The same prophecy was being made not more than three 
 years ago of the South African Dutch. After asking for a 
 century and a half to manage her own affairs, the Irish are 
 not likely to ask to be ruled by Germans. The German 
 strategists are men of common sense. If they were for- 
 tunate enough to gain the command of the sea, they could 
 make no worse mistake than to dissipate their energies on 
 Ireland. 
 
 Perhaps it is a waste of tune to attempt to destroy these 
 foolish myths. Let those that are sceptical about the effect of 
 Home Rule in producing friendlier feelings between Ireland and 
 Great Britain consider in a reasonable spirit the commonplace 
 question of mutual interests. What is the really practical 
 significance of Ireland's proximity to England ? This, that 
 their material interests are indissociably intertwined. If 
 it is " safe," as the phrase goes, to entrust Australia with 
 Home Rule, surely it is safer still to entrust Ireland with 
 it. Has Ireland anything to gain by separation ? Clearly 
 nothing. Has she anything to lose ? Much. Most of her 
 trade is with Great Britain. British credit is of enormous 
 value to her. The Imperial forces are of less proportionate 
 value to her because her external trade is small ; but she 
 willingly supplies a large and important part of their per- 
 sonnel ; she shares in their glorious traditions ; and if it is a 
 case of protection for her trade, she will get no protection 
 elsewhere.
 
 148 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 How idle are these calculations of profit and loss ! The 
 truth is that Ireland has taken her full share in winning and 
 populating the Empire. The result is hers as much as Britain's. 
 Mr. Redmond spoke for his countrymen last May* in saying : 
 " We, as Irishmen, are not prepared to surrender our share in 
 the heritage [that is, the British Empire] which our fathers 
 created." That is sound sentiment and sound sense. It is 
 the view taken by the Colonies, where Irishmen are known, 
 respected, and understood, and where the support for Home 
 Rule, based on personal experience of its blessings, has been, 
 and remains, consistent and strong. Indeed, we miss the sig- 
 nificance of that support if we do not realize that Irish Home 
 Rule is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of 
 the various parts of the Empire. Let us add the wider general- 
 ization that it is an indispensable preliminary to the closer 
 union of all the English-speaking races. It may be fairly 
 computed that a fifth of the present white population of the 
 United States is of Irish blood. f American opinion, as a 
 whole, so far as it is directed towards Ireland and away from 
 a host of absorbing domestic problems, is favourable to Home 
 Rule. Irish- American opinion has never swerved, although 
 it has become more sober, as the material condition of Ireland 
 has improved, and the interests of Irish-Americans themselves 
 have become more closely identified with those of their adopted 
 country. Fenianism is altogether extinct. The extreme claim 
 for the total separation of Ireland from Great Britain is now 
 no more than a sentimental survival among a handful of the 
 older men, of the fierce hatreds provoked by the miseries and 
 
 * At Woodford, May 27, 1911. 
 
 f This is a very general statement. No figures exist for an accurate 
 computation. The Census of 1910 gives the total population of the United 
 States, white and coloured, as 91,272,266, of whom nearly 9,000,000 are 
 negroes. The figures about countries of origin are not yet available. The 
 statistical abstract of the United States (1908) gives the total number of 
 immigrants from Ireland from 1821 to 1908 as 4,168,747 (the large majority 
 of whom must have been of marriageable age), but does not estimate the sub- 
 sequent increase by marriage, and takes no account of the immigration prior 
 to 1821, which was very large, especially in the period preceding the Revolu- 
 tionary War of 1775-1782. At the Census of 1900 Irishmen actually born in 
 Ireland and then resident in the United States are stated to have been 
 1,018,567, as compared with 93,682 from Wales, 233,977 from Scotland, and 
 842,078_from England.
 
 THE ANALOGY 149 
 
 horrors of an era which has passed away.* Even Mr. Patrick 
 Ford and the Irish World have moderated their tone, 
 and where that tone is still inflammatory it is not repre- 
 sentative of Irish - American opinion. I have studied 
 with a good deal of care the columns of that journal 
 for some months back, smiling over the imaginary terrors 
 of the nervous people on this side of the Atlantic who are 
 taught by their party Press to believe that Mr. Patrick 
 Ford is going to dynamite them in their beds. Any liberal- 
 minded student of history and human nature would pro- 
 nounce the whole propaganda perfectly harmless. But the 
 sane instinct that Ireland should have a local autonomy of 
 her own, an instinct common to the whole brotherhood of 
 nations which have sprung from these shores, lasts undimin- 
 ished and takes shape, quite rightly and naturally, as it takes 
 shape in the Colonies, in financial support of the Nationalist 
 party in Ireland. Anti-British sentiment in the United States, 
 once a grave international danger, is that no longer ; but 
 it does still represent an obstacle to the complete realization 
 of an ideal which all patriotic men should aim at : the forma- 
 tion of indestructible bonds of friendship between Great Britain 
 and the United States. Nor must it be forgotten that the calm 
 and reasonable character of Irish- American opinion is due in 
 a large degree to confidence in the ultimate success of the con- 
 stitutional movement here for Home Rule. Every successive 
 defeat of that policy tends to embitter feeling in America. 
 
 Oh, for an hour of intelligent politics ! The old choice is 
 before us to make the best or the worst of the state of opinion 
 in America ; to disinter from ancient files of the Irish World 
 sentences calculated to inflame an ignorant British audience ; 
 or to say in sensible and manly terms : " The situation is more 
 favourable than it has been for a century past for the settle- 
 ment of just Irish claims." 
 
 * I am especially indebted for information to Mr. Hugh Sutherland, of the 
 North American (Philadelphia), to Mr. Rodman Wanainaker, of the same 
 city, to Mr. Frank Sanborn, of Concord, and to Mr. John O'Callaghan, 
 of Boston.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 
 
 WHY does present-day Ireland need Home Rule ? I put the 
 question in that way because I am not going to question the 
 fact that she wants Home Rule. She has always said she 
 wanted it : she says so still, and that is enough. There is 
 a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There 
 always have been minorities more or less powerful against 
 Home Rule in all ages and places. That does not alter the 
 national character of the claim. If once we go behind the 
 voice of a people, constitutionally expressed, we court 
 endless risks. National leaders have always been called 
 " agitators," which, of course, they are, and non-representative 
 agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of 
 a claim which is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions 
 to measures of Home Rule. The denial is generally irre- 
 concilable with the case made for the dangers of Home Rule, 
 and that contradiction in its most glaring shape characterizes 
 the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists 
 should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my 
 part I shall assume that the large majority of Irishmen, as 
 shown by successive electoral votes, want Home Rule. Pre- 
 cisely what form of Home Rule they want is another and by 
 no means so clear a matter, on which I shall presently have 
 a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to manage 
 their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of 
 Ireland if that was not her desire. 
 
 What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is 
 the deep spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule ? 
 A craving for self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is 
 synonymous with the growth of independent character. That 
 is why Ireland instinctively and passionately wants it, that 
 
 160
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 151 
 
 is why she needs it, and that is why Great Britain, for her own 
 sake, and Ireland's, should give it. If that is not the reason, 
 it is idle to talk about Home Rule ; but it is the reason. 
 
 Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and 
 happiness, and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot 
 discern the profound effect of political institutions upon human 
 character. Self-government in the community corresponds to 
 free will in the individual. I am far from saying that self- 
 government is everything. But I do say that it is the master- 
 key. It is fundamental. Give responsibility and you will 
 create responsibility. Through political responsibility only 
 can a society brace itself to organized effort, find out its own 
 opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and elicit 
 the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems. 
 
 These are such commonplaces in every other part of the 
 Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men 
 smile if you suggest the contrary. But ordinary reasoning 
 is rarely applied to Ireland. There " good government " 
 has been held to be "a substitute for self-government " and 
 a regime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient 
 compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In 
 this paternal regime it is impossible to include those great 
 measures of land reform passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which 
 revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier 
 tenant into a judicial tenant.* Although these measures, 
 which fall into an altogether different category from the 
 subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,^ were inspired 
 by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they 
 cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, 
 shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the 
 spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the 
 desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any 
 cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their 
 countrymen. The methods of these men were destructive. 
 They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of 
 all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they 
 sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs 
 and cure her own economic evils. It is often said that Parnell 
 gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement 
 * See pp. 13-17 and 66-71. f Dealt with fully in Chapter XIV.
 
 152 
 
 by harnessing it to the land question. True ; but what a 
 strange way of expressing a truth ! Anywhere outside Ireland 
 men would say that self-government was the best road to the 
 reform of a bad land system. 
 
 With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the 
 alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic 
 relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came 
 over the spirit of British statesmanship. With the exception 
 of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed 
 for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were 
 responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt that 
 opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous 
 policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief 
 Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and 
 Mr. George Wyndham efforts often made in the teeth of 
 bitter opposition from Irish Unionists to carry out this 
 policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act of 1891, with its 
 grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land 
 Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts 
 Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in 
 the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. 
 The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment 
 of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 
 another. In the following year came the Act setting up the 
 Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wj-ndham's great 
 Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange " devolutionist " 
 episode, arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now T 
 Lord) MacDonnell to the post of Under-Secretary at Dublin 
 Castle, the Government who selected him being fully aware that 
 he was in favour of some change in the government of Ireland. 
 He entered into relations with a group of prominent Irishmen, 
 headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a scheme 
 for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became 
 known, there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. 
 Mr. Wyndham, who had been a popular Chief Secretary, 
 resigned office, and was succeeded by Mr. Walter Long ; 
 perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in modern 
 times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and 
 direct defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority 
 of Irishmen.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 153 
 
 The Liberal Government of 1906, coming into office under 
 a pledge to refrain from a full Home Rule measure, confined 
 itself to the introduction of the Irish Council Bill of 1907, 
 which, rightly, in my opinion, was repudiated by the Irish 
 people, and accordingly dropped. But the Government was 
 in general sympathy with Nationalist Ireland, so that a 
 number of useful measures were added to the statute books ; 
 for example, the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, empowering 
 Rural Councils, with the aid of State credit, to acquire land 
 for labourers' plots and cottages ; the Town Tenants Act, 
 extending the principle of compensation for improvements 
 at the termination of a lease to the urban tenant ; the very 
 important Irish Universities Act of 1908, which gave to Roman 
 Catholics facilities for higher education which they had lacked 
 for centuries, and, lastly, Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 1909, which 
 was designed partly to meet the imminent collapse of Land 
 Purchase, owing to the failure of the financial arrangements 
 made under the Wyndham Act of 1903, and partly to extend 
 the powers of the Congested Districts Board. 
 
 To these measures must be added another which was not 
 confined to Ireland, but which has exercised a most potent 
 influence, and by no means a wholly beneficial influence, on 
 Irish life and Irish finance, the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, 
 under which the enormous sum of two and three-quarter millions 
 is now allocated to Ireland.* 
 
 The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that 
 it has laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian 
 crime has disappeared and material prosperity has greatly 
 increased. Government in the interests of a small favoured 
 class has almost vanished. It survives to this extent, that 
 civil administration and patronage, which are still, be it re- 
 membered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact, 
 in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether dispro- 
 portionate to the distribution of creeds, classes, and opinions. 
 And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of 
 the Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by 
 seventeen out of the thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in 
 
 * In 1910-11, 2,408,000 (Treasury Return No. 220, 1911) ; plus 225,000 
 estimated increase owing to removal of Poor Law disqualification (Answer to 
 Question in House of Commons, February 15, 1911).
 
 154 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the House of Lords by an overwhelming preponderance of 
 Unionist peers, is still enormous. But within Ireland itself, 
 central administration apart, the exceptional privileges and 
 exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords, 
 which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non- 
 existent. The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely 
 enhancing the moral power and religious zeal of the Church 
 of Ireland, and even strengthening its financial position, took 
 away its political monopoly, and through the final abolition 
 of tithes, its baneful and irritating interference with economic 
 life. The successive measures of land legislation, culminating 
 in the transfer of half the land of Ireland from landlord to 
 peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of 
 1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration 
 of the country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional 
 political privileges of the landlord class. 
 
 Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the 
 past. What has taken its place ? What is the ruling power 
 within Ireland ? Is it a public opinion derived from the 
 vital contact of ideas and interests, and taking shape in a 
 healthy and normal distribution of parties ? Is thought free ? 
 Has merit its reward ? Is there any unity of national purpose, 
 transcending party divisions ? If it were necessary to give a 
 categorical "Yes" or " No" to these questions, the answer would 
 be "No." Sane energizing politics, and the sovereign ascen- 
 dancy of a sane public opinion, are absolutely unattainable in 
 Ireland or anywhere else without Home Rule. It is all the 
 more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the face of stupendous 
 difficulties, and in a marvellously short space of time since 
 the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary 
 conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have 
 gone towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently 
 thinking, united Ireland. The whole weight of Imperial 
 authority has been thrown into the scale against them. 
 Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of 
 the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, 
 their constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, 
 " Look to us. Trust in us. You are divided. We are 
 umpires," and the reader will no doubt remember that the 
 theory of " umpirage " was used in exactly the same way
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 155 
 
 in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,* to thwart the 
 tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and 
 classes. Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have 
 laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, 
 and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland 
 on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have consciously 
 aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, 
 some have not ; but the result of these efforts has been the 
 same, to pull Irishmen together and to begin the creation of 
 a genuinely national atmosphere. 
 
 It is not part of my scheme to describe in detail the various 
 movements, agricultural, industrial, economic, literary, 
 political, which in the last twenty years have contributed to 
 this national revival. Some have a world- wide fame, all have 
 been excellently described at one time or another by writers 
 of talent and insight. f My purpose is to note their character- 
 istics and progress, and to estimate their political significance. 
 In the first place it must be remembered that some of the most 
 important of the modern legislative measures have been initiated 
 and promoted by Home Rulers and Unionists, Roman Catholics 
 and Protestants, acting in friendly co-operation and throwing 
 aside their political and religious antagonisms. Such was 
 the origin of the great Land Purchase Act of 1903, which 
 Mr. Wyndham drafted on the basis of an agreement reached 
 at a friendly conference of landlords and representatives of 
 tenants. But a far more interesting and hopeful instance 
 of co-operation had taken place seven years earlier. One of 
 the very few really constructive measures of the last twenty 
 years, the Act of 1899 for setting up the Department of 
 Agriculture and Technical Instruction, was the direct outcome 
 of the recommendations of the Recess Committee brought 
 together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett ; a Com- 
 mittee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the 
 House of Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster 
 captains of industry, the Grand Master of the Belfast Orange- 
 men, and an eminent Jesuit.^ In its reunion of men divided 
 
 * See p. 101. 
 
 t See particularly " Ireland in the New Century," Sir Horace Plunkett; 
 " Contemporary Ireland," E. Paul-Dubois ; " The New Ireland," Sydney 
 Brooks. 
 
 | " Report of the Recess Committee," New Edition (Fisher Unwin).
 
 156 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of Conference that 
 assembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a devastating 
 war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African 
 Union. That Conference was the natural outcome of the 
 grant of Home Rule to the defeated Boer States. The Irish 
 Conference, succeeding a land-war far more destructive and 
 demoralizing, was brought together in spite of the absence of 
 Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,* is a measure 
 of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial 
 of self-government. There lay Ireland, an island with a rich 
 soil and a clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind 
 England, far behind all the progressive nations of Europe in 
 agriculture and industry, her population declining, her land 
 passing out of cultivation,f her strongest sons and daughters 
 hurrying away to enrich with their wits and sinews distant 
 lands. There, in short, lay a country groaning for intelligent 
 development by the concentrated energies of her own people. 
 
 " We have in Ireland," runs the first paragraph of the Report 
 of the Committee, " a poor country practically without manu- 
 factures except for the linen and shipbuilding of the north, 
 and the brewing and distilling of Dublin dependent upon 
 agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled, its area under 
 cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population without 
 industrial habits or technical skill." 
 
 The leeway to make up was enormous. To go no farther 
 back than the institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate 
 destruction of the woollen industry, two centuries of caUous 
 repression at the hands of an external authority had maimed 
 and exhausted the country whose condition the Committee 
 had met to consider. These facts the members of the Com- 
 
 * Colonel Saunderson, for example, the leader of the Irish Unionists in the 
 Commons, refused publicly to be a member of a committee on which Mr. 
 Redmond sat. Mr. John Redmond himself wrote that he could not take a 
 very sanguine view of the Conference, but that he was " unwilling to take the 
 responsibility of declining to aid in any effort to promote useful legislation in 
 Ireland." 
 
 t Area under cultivation in 1875, 5,332,813 acres; in 1894, 4,931,011 
 acres (in 1899, 4,627,545 acres ; in 1900, on a system of classification dividing 
 arable land more accurately from pasture, there were only 3,100,397 acres 
 arable, and in 1905 the figures were 2,999,082 acres) (Official Returns). 
 Population in 1841, 8,175,124; in 1851, 6,552,385; in 1861, 5,798,976; in 
 1871, 5,412,377; in 1881, 5,174,836; in 1891, 4,704,750 ; in 1892, 4,633,808; 
 in 1893, 4,607,462 ; in 1894, 4,589,260 ; in 1895,4,559,936 (in 1901,4,458,775; 
 in 1905, 4,891,543). Census Returns and Thorns' Directory.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 157 
 
 mittee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is 
 entitled with gentle irony " Past Action of the State." Here, 
 then, was a purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every 
 Irishman, poor or rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a 
 problem of which Great Britain, though responsible both for 
 its existence and its solution, knew and cared little. The really 
 strange thing is, not that representative Irishmen should 
 have met together to consider and prescribe for the deplorable 
 economic condition of their country, but that they should not 
 also, like the South African Conference, have drafted a Con- 
 stitution for Ireland, on the sound ground that a system of 
 government which had promoted and sustained the evils they 
 described could never, with the best will in the world, become 
 a good government for Ireland. Yet for a brief space of time 
 these men actually had Home Rule, and by virtue of that 
 privilege they did better work for Ireland in six months than 
 had been done in two centuries. 
 
 What is more, they used the Home Rule principle in their 
 recommendations for the establishment of a Department 
 of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. " We think it 
 essential," they reported on p. 101, " that the new Depart- 
 ment should be in touch with the public opinion of the classes 
 whom its work concerns, and should rely largely for its 
 success upon their active assistance and co-operation." Its 
 chief, they added, should be a Minister directly responsible to 
 Parliament, and on p. 103 they advocated a Consultative 
 Council, whose functions should be (1) To keep the Depart- 
 ment in direct touch with the public opinion of those classes 
 whom the work of the Ministry concerns ; and (2) to distribute 
 some of the responsibility for administration amongst those 
 classes." Now these, in Ireland, were revolutionary pro- 
 posals. The idea of any part of the Government " being in 
 touch with public opinion " was wholly new. The idea of 
 " distributing responsibility for administration " amongst 
 the subjects of administration was startlingly novel. Ireland, 
 both before and after the Union, had always been governed 
 on a diametrically opposite principle. Since the Union, when 
 Irish departmental Ministers, never responsible to the people, 
 disappeared, not one of the host of nominated Irish Boards 
 was legally amenable to Irish public opinion. Not one had
 
 158 
 
 a separate Minister responsible even to the Parliament at 
 Westminster, which was not an Irish Parliament. A fortiori, 
 not one relied on the co-operation and advice of the classes 
 for whose benefit it was supposed to exist. 
 
 Proposed, nevertheless, by a group of representative Irish- 
 men, the scheme for a democratically constituted Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture passed smoothly into law as soon as the 
 machinery for ascertaining public opinion on the matters at 
 issue had been brought into existence. Mr. Gerald Balfour, 
 the Chief Secretary, was engaged at the time upon his measure 
 for the extension of Local Government to Ireland. This 
 measure became law in 1898, and the Department Act in 1899. 
 Under that Act, the duty was laid upon each of the new 
 County Councils of electing two members to serve upon a 
 Consultative Council of Agriculture, to which a minority of 
 nominated members was added, and this Council in its turn 
 elects two-thirds of the members of an Agricultural Board, 
 and supplies four representatives to a Board of Technical 
 Instruction, which, like the Council and the Agricultural 
 Board, has a predominantly popular character.* 
 
 At the summit stands the Minister, or Vice-President, as 
 he is called (for in accordance with ancient custom, the Chief 
 Secretary is nominally in supreme control of this as of all 
 other Irish Departments), and a large and efficient staff of 
 permanent officials. He and his staff have a large centralized 
 authority, but this authority is subject to a constitutional 
 check in the shape of a veto wielded by the Boards over the 
 expenditure of the Endowment Fund. What is more im- 
 portant, policy tends to be shaped in accordance with popular 
 views by the existence of the Council and the Boards. 
 
 Here, then, is the germ of responsible government. At first 
 sight a critic might exclaim : " Why, here is democracy pushed 
 to a point unknown even in Great Britain, where Government 
 Departments are wholly independent of Local Councils." 
 
 * Council of Agriculture : 68 members elected by County Councils ; 34 
 appointed by the Department from the various provinces. Total 102. 
 
 Board of Agriculture : 8 members elected by Council of Agriculture ; 
 4 appointed by the Department. Total 12. 
 
 Board of Technical Instruction : 10 members appointed by County 
 Boroughs ; 4 elected by Council of Agriculture ; 6 appointed by the various 
 Government Departments ; 1 by a joint Committee of Dublin District 
 Councils. Total 21.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 159 
 
 That is in a limited sense true, and it is quite arguable that 
 British Departments would be the better for an infusion of 
 local control. But we must not be misled by a false analogy. 
 Great Britain reaches the Irish ideal by other means. Her 
 departmental Ministers are directly responsible to a pre- 
 dominantly British House of Commons where a hostile vote 
 can at any moment eject them from office.* There is no Irish 
 Parliament, nor any kind of predominantly Irish body which 
 is vested with the same power. The Vice-President of the Irish 
 Department of Agriculture, an institution concerned exclusively 
 with Irish affairs, whether he sits in the House of Commons or 
 not (and for two years Mr. T. W. Russell had not a seat at 
 Westminster), could not be ejected from office even by a 
 unanimous vote of Irish Members of the House, with the moral 
 backing of a unanimous Irish people.f That is one of the 
 anomalous results of the Union, and it was a recognition, 
 though rather a confused one, of this anomaly, that inspired 
 the ingenious compromise invented by the Recess Committee 
 for introducing an element of popular control. But what 
 a light the compromise throws on the anomaly which evoked 
 it ! Is it common sense to make these elaborate arrangements 
 for promoting an Irish Department on an Irish popular basis 
 while recoiling in terror from the prospect of crowning them 
 with a Minister responsible to an Irish Parliament ? The 
 consequence is that even in this solitary example of an Irish 
 
 * I am not forgetting Scotland. Her few local departments are theoretically, 
 but not practically, at the mercy of English votes and influence. Scotch 
 opinion, broadly speaking, governs Scotch affairs. Precisely to the extent to 
 which it does not so govern them, is a demand for Home Rule likely to grow. 
 
 f Even the Eecess Committee (and we cannot wonder) but dimly grasped 
 the constitutional position when they laid stress on the necessity for an 
 Agricultural Minister " directly responsible to Parliament." Logically, they 
 should have first recommended the establishment of an Irish Parliament to 
 which the Minister should be responsible. To make him responsible to the 
 House of Commons was absurd ; and a Departmental Committee of 1907 
 has, in fact, recommended that the Vice-President should not have a seat in 
 Parliament, but should remain in his proper place, Ireland. Meanwhile, the 
 original mistake has caused friction and controversy. Soon after the Liberal 
 Ministry took office in 1906, Sir Horace Plunkett, the first Vice-President, as 
 a Unionist, was replaced by Mr. T. W. Russell, a Home Ruler. On the assump- 
 tion that such an Office was Parliamentary, its holder standing or falling 
 with the British Ministry of the day, the step was quite justifiable, and even 
 necessary. On the opposite assumption, confirmed by the Departmental 
 Committee, the step was unjustifiable, that is, on the theory of the Union. An 
 Irish Parliament alone should have the power of displacing Irish Ministers.
 
 160 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Department under semi-popular control we see the subtle 
 taint of Crown Colony Government. Popular opinion, acting 
 indirectly, first through the Council and then through the 
 Boards, can legally paralyze the Department by declining 
 to appropriate money in the way it prescribes, while possessing 
 no legal power to enforce a different policy or change the 
 personnel of administration. This is only an object-lesson. 
 I hasten to add that such a paralysis has never taken place, 
 though some acrimonious controversy, natural enough under 
 the anomalous state of things, has arisen over the office of Vice- 
 President. There is now only one means by which Irish opinion 
 can, if it be so disposed, displace the holder of the office, and 
 that is a thoroughly unreliable and unhealthy means, namely, 
 through pressure brought to bear by one or other of the Irish 
 Parliamentary parties upon a newly elected British Ministry.* 
 But why in the world should the British party pendulum 
 determine an important Irish matter like this ? Why, 
 a fortiori, should it determine the appointment to the office of 
 Chief Secretary, the irresponsible Prime Minister, or, rather 
 the autocrat of Ireland ? It is the reductio ad absurdum of the 
 Union. 
 
 The Department commands a large measure of confidence. 
 It would command far greater confidence if it were responsible 
 to an Irish Parliament ; but Irishmen are sensible enough 
 to perceive that as long as the Union lasts, everyone is in- 
 terested in making the existing system work smoothly and 
 well. The general policy as laid down in the first instance, 
 by the first Vice-President, Sir Horace Plunkett, has been 
 sound and wise ;j- to proceed slowly, while building up a 
 staff of trained instructors, inspectors, organizers ; to devote 
 money and labour mainly to education, both industrial and 
 agricultural, and to evoke self-reliance and initiative in the 
 people by, so far as possible, spending money locally only 
 where a local contribution is raised and a local scheme pre- 
 pared. The last aim met with a fine response. Every County 
 Council in Ireland raises a rate, and has a scheme for agricul- 
 tural and technical instruction. I can only enumerate some of 
 the multifarious functions which the Department evolved for 
 
 * Sec footnote, p. 159. 
 
 f "Organization and Policy of the Department," Official Pamphlet.
 
 IRELAND TODAY 161 
 
 itself or took over from various other unrelated Boards and 
 concentrated under single control. It gives instruction in 
 agriculture and rural domestic economy (horticulture, butter- 
 making, bee-keeping, poultry-keeping, etc.) through schools, 
 colleges, or agricultural stations under its own direction, 
 through private schools for both sexes, and through an ex- 
 tensive system of itinerant courses conducted (in 1909) 
 by 128 trained instructors. It gives premiums for the 
 breeding of horses, cattle, asses, poultry, swine. It conducts 
 original research, it experiments in crops, and, among other 
 things, is slowly resuscitating the depressed industry of flax- 
 growing, and starting a wholly new industry in the southern 
 counties, that of early potatoes. It sprays potatoes, pre- 
 scribes for the diseases of trees, crops, and stock, advises 
 on manures and feeding-stuffs, teaches forestry, and gives 
 scholarships at various colleges for proficiency in agricultural 
 science. On the side of Technical Instruction it teaches and 
 encourages all manner of small industries, such as lace-making. 
 It superintends all technical instruction in secondary schools, 
 and organizes and subsidizes similar instruction in a multitude 
 of different subjects under schemes prepared by local authori- 
 ties, while at the same time carrying on an important and 
 extensive system of training teachers. It also superintends 
 sea-fisheries and improves harbours. 
 
 The material results have been great ; the moral results 
 perhaps even greater. Just as we should expect, wherever 
 education goes, and wherever men work together for economic 
 improvement, unnatural antagonisms of race and religion tend 
 to disappear. This is not the result of any direct influence 
 wielded by the Department, which never finds it necessary 
 to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance ; it is the 
 result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule. 
 High officials of the Department have informed me that their 
 work, for all intents and purposes, is unhampered by local 
 religious prejudices. A spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry 
 permeates the people. County and Borough Committees in 
 districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large powers 
 of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regard- 
 less of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain 
 a glimpse of the real Belfast of the present and the future, as 
 
 11
 
 162 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 distinguished from the ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city 
 which some even of its own citizens perversely insist on dis- 
 playing to their English friends, a Belfast as tolerant and 
 generous as it is energetic and progressive, should visit the 
 magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000 boys 
 and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on 
 equal terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary 
 variety of educational courses in a building furnished with 
 lecture-rooms, laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, 
 of a perfection hardly to be surpassed in any city of the United 
 Kingdom. 
 
 Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven 
 years, and it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, 
 constructive thought devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their 
 own country. 
 
 Let us also remember that it represents the application of 
 State-aid to economic development. But with the utmost 
 caution, and the utmost efforts to elicit self-help, one may go 
 too far in the direction of State-aid, and even in this sphere it is 
 by no means certain that Ireland is free from danger. Let us 
 pass to another movement whose essence is self-help : I mean 
 the movement for Agricultural Co - operation. Here again 
 Sir Horace Plunkett was the originator. Indeed, with him 
 and his able associates and advisers, of whom Lord Monteagle 
 and Mr. R. A. Anderson, the Secretary of the I.A.O.S., were 
 the first, the twin aims of self-help and State-aid were com- 
 bined as they should be, in one big, harmonious policy. Self- 
 help must, indeed, they held, be antecedent to, and prepara- 
 tory for, State-aid. The position confronting them was that 
 half a million unorganized tenant farmers, for the most part 
 cultivating excessively small holdings, and just beginning to 
 emerge after generations of agrarian war from an economic 
 serfdom, were face to face with the competition of highly 
 organized European countries, and of vast and rapidly develop- 
 ing territories of North and South America. It was as far 
 back as 1889 that the first propaganda was begun, and in 1894, 
 a year before the Recess Committee met, the Irish Agricul- 
 tural Organization Society was formed. By unwearied pains 
 and patience, seemingly hopeless obstacles had been overcome, 
 apathy, ignorance, and often contemptuous opposition from
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 
 
 163 
 
 men of both political parties. For, with that ruinous pessimism 
 always endemic in countries not politically free, and exactly 
 paralleled in the Canada described by the Durham Report 
 of 1839, extremists were inclined to suspect any movement 
 which drew recruits from both political camps. Nevertheless, 
 the island is now covered with a network of 886 co-operative 
 societies, creameries, agricultural societies (for selling imple- 
 ments, foodstuffs, etc.), credit banks, poultry societies, and 
 other miscellaneous organizations. The total membership is 
 nearly 100,000, the total turnover nearly two and a half 
 millions.* Nearly half the butter exported from Ireland is 
 made in the 392 co-operative creameries, and at the other end 
 of the scale extraordinarily valuable work is done by the 237 
 agricultural credit banks, which supply small loans, averaging 
 only 4 apiece, for strictly productive purposes on a system of 
 mutual credit. 
 
 Moral and material regeneration go together. The aim is 
 to build up a new rural civilization, to put life, heart, and hope 
 into the monotony of country life and unite all classes in the 
 strong bonds of sympathy and interest : a splendid ideal, 
 applicable not to Ireland alone, but to all countries, and 
 Ireland may truly be said to be pointing the way to many 
 another country, Great Britain included. 
 
 The Co-operative movement attracts the most intelligent 
 
 * STATISTICS OF THE IRISH AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATION MOVEMENT TO 
 DECEMBER 31, 1909, WITH NUMBER OF SOCIETIES IN EXISTENCE ON 
 DECEMBER 31, 1910 (SUPPLIED BY THE I.A.O.S.) : 
 
 
 Number of 
 
 
 
 
 
 Description. 
 
 Societies. 
 
 Member- 
 ship. 
 
 Paid-up 
 Shares. 
 
 Loan 
 Capital. 
 
 Turnover. 
 
 
 
 1910. 
 
 1909. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Creameries 
 
 392 
 
 380 
 
 44,213 
 
 138,354 
 
 111,365 
 
 1,841,400 
 
 Agricultural 
 
 169 
 
 155 
 
 16,050 
 
 6,253 
 
 40,326 
 
 112,222 
 
 Credit ... 
 
 237 
 
 234 
 
 18,422 
 
 
 
 56,469 
 
 57,641 
 
 Poultry 
 
 18 
 
 18 
 
 6,152 
 
 2,292 
 
 4,026 
 
 64,342 
 
 Industries 
 
 21 
 
 21 
 
 1,375 
 
 1,267 
 
 1,450 
 
 7,666 
 
 Miscellaneous 
 
 37 
 
 15 
 
 4,633 
 
 15,015 
 
 2,864 
 
 48,987 
 
 Flax ... 
 
 9 
 
 9 
 
 589 
 
 482 
 
 5,796 
 
 2,286 
 
 Federations 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 227 
 
 6,753 
 
 6,360 
 
 259,925 
 
 
 886 
 
 835 
 
 91,661 
 
 170,416 
 
 228,656 
 
 2,394,469
 
 164 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 and progressive elements of the rural population. Strictly 
 non-political itself, it unites creeds and parties. It is as strong 
 in predominantly Roman Catholic districts as in predomi- 
 nantly Protestant districts, strongest of all in Catholic Wexford. 
 Probably two-thirds or more of the co-operators are Home 
 Rulers, but that only accidentally reflects the distribution of 
 Irish parties. On the local committees political animus is 
 unknown. The governing body contains members, lay and 
 clerical, of all shades of opinion. Step into Plunkett House, 
 that hospitable headquarters of the Organization Society, and 
 if you have been nurtured in legends about inextinguishable 
 class and creed antipathies, which are supposed to render 
 Home Rule impossible and the eternal " umpirage " of 
 Great Britain inevitable, you will soon learn to marvel that 
 anyone can be found to propagate them. Here, just because 
 men are working together in a practical, self-contained, home- 
 ruled organization for the good of the whole country, you will 
 find liberality, open-mindedness, brotherhood, and keen, intelli- 
 gent patriotism from Ulsterman and Southerners alike. The 
 atmosphere is not political. But you will come away with a 
 sense of the absurdity, of the insolence, of saying that a country 
 which can produce and conduct fine movements like this is 
 unfit for self-government. I should add a word about a new 
 organization which only came into being this year, and which 
 also has its home at Plunkett House, the United Irishwomen, 
 whose aim, in their own words, is to " unite Irishwomen for 
 the social and economic advantage of Ireland." " They 
 intend to organize the women of all classes in every rural 
 district in Ireland for social service. These bodies will discuss, 
 and, if need be, take action upon any and every matter which 
 concerns the welfare of society in their several localities. So 
 far as women's knowledge and influence will avail, they will 
 strive for a higher standard of material comfort and physical 
 well-being in the country home, a more advanced agricultural 
 economy, and a social existence a little more in harmony with 
 the intellect and temperament of our people." Anyone who 
 wants to understand something of the spirit of the new self- 
 reliant Ireland which is springing up to-day should read the 
 thrilling little pamphlet (I cannot describe it otherwise) from 
 which I quote these words, and which introduced the United
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 165 
 
 Irish-women to the world, with its preface by Father T. A. 
 Finlay, and its essays by Mrs. Ellice Pilkington, Sir Horace 
 Plunkett, and Mr. George W. Russell, better known as " M" 
 poet, painter, and Editor of the Co-operative weekly, the Irish 
 Homestead. Nor can I leave this part of my subject without 
 referring to that amazing little journal. No other newspaper 
 in the world that I know of bears upon it so deep an impress 
 of genius. There are no " politics," in the Irish sense, in it. 
 It would be impossible to infer from its pages how the Editor 
 voted. What fascinates the reader is the shrewd and witty 
 analysis of Irish problems, the high range of vision which 
 exposes the shortcomings and reveals the illimitable possi- 
 bilities of a regenerated Ireland and the ceaseless and 
 implacable war waged by the Editor upon all pettiness, 
 melancholy, and pessimism. 
 
 What the Agricultural Organization Society is doing for 
 agriculture the Industrial Development Associations, formed 
 only in quite recent years, are doing, in a different way, for 
 the encouragement of Irish industries. The Associations of 
 Belfast, Cork, and other cities work in harmony, and meet in 
 an annual All-Ireland Industrial Conference. Their effort is 
 to secure the concentration of Irish brains and capital on 
 Irish industrial questions, to promote the sale of Irish goods, 
 both in Ireland, Great Britain, and foreign countries, and to pro- 
 tect these goods against piracy and illicit competition.* Here 
 again co-operation for Irish welfare brings together the creeds 
 and races, and tends to extinguish old bigotries and anti- 
 pathies. Here again the truth is recognized that Ireland is a 
 distinct economic entity whose conditions and needs demand 
 special study from her citizens. In a country of which that 
 basal truth is recognized it would seem inexplicable that 
 Protestants and Catholics who meet in committee-rooms and 
 on platforms to promote, outside Parliament, the common 
 interests of Ireland, should not unite as one man to demand 
 an Irish Legislature in which to focus those interests and make 
 them the subjects of direct legislative enactment, free both 
 
 * An Irish Trademark has been secured, and has proved of great value' 
 " Irish Weeks," for the furtherance of the sale of Irish products, are held. 
 The organ of the Association is the Irish Industrial Journal, published 
 weekly in Dublin.
 
 166 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 from the paternal and the coercive interference of a country 
 differently situated, and absorbed in its own affairs. 
 
 I pass from the agricultural and industrial movements to 
 another powerful factor in the reconstruction of Ireland, 
 namely, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, whose success 
 under the Presidency of Dr. Douglas Hyde in reviving the 
 old national language, culture, and amusements, is attracting 
 the attention of the world. Fortunately the League en- 
 countered some ridicule at the outset and prospered proportion- 
 ately. Some of its work is not above criticism, but few 
 persons and none who have the least knowledge of such 
 intellectual revivals elsewhere now care to laugh at it. The 
 League is non-political and non-sectarian. Strange, is it not, 
 that such a movement should have to emphasize the fact ? 
 Strange paradox that in a country which is being re-born 
 into a consciousness of its own individuality, which is regain- 
 ing its own pride and self-respect, recovering its lost literature 
 and culture, and vibrating to that " iron string, Trust thyself," 
 the conflict for self-government, that elementary symbol of 
 self-trust, should still retain enough intestinal bitterness to 
 compel men to label national movements as non-political and 
 non-sectarian ! It would be idle, of course, to pretend that 
 this national movement, like all others in Ireland, does not 
 strengthen, especially among the younger generation, which 
 grows increasingly Nationalist, the sentiment for Home Rule. 
 If it did not, we should indeed be in the presence of something 
 miraculously abnormal. 
 
 Meanwhile the Celtic revival does visible good. The 
 language is no longer a fad ; it is an envied accomplishment, 
 a mark of distinction and education. Wherever it goes, 
 North and South, it obliterates race and creed distinctions, 
 and all the terrible memories associated with them. There are 
 Ulstermen of Saxon or Scottish stock hi whom the fascination of 
 Irish art and literature has extirpated every trace of Orangeism 
 and all implied in it. The language revivifies traditions, as 
 beautiful as they are glorious, of an Ireland full of high passions 
 and stormy domestic feuds, but united in sentiment, breeding 
 warriors, poets, lawgivers, saints, and fertilizing Europe with 
 her missionary genius. However far those times are, however 
 grim and pitiful the havoc wrought by the race war, it is
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 167 
 
 nevertheless a fact for thinkers and statesmen to ponder over, 
 not a phantasy to sneer at, that Celtic Ireland lives. Angliciz- 
 ation has failed, not because Celts cannot appreciate the 
 noblest manifestations of English genius in art, letters, science, 
 war, colonization, but because to repress their own culture and 
 nationality is at the same time to repress their power of appre- 
 ciation and assimilation. Until comparatively recent times, it 
 was only the worst of English literature and music, the cheapest 
 newspaper twaddle, the inanest music-hall songs, which pene- 
 trated beyond a limited circle of culture into the life of the 
 country. The revolt against this sterilizing and belittling side 
 of anglicization is strong and healthy. It affects all classes. 
 Farmers, labourers, small tradesmen, who had never con- 
 ceived the idea of learning for learning's sake, and who had 
 grown up, thanks to the national system of education, in all 
 but complete ignorance of their own country's history and 
 literature, spend time on reading and study and hi the practice 
 of the old indigenous dances and music, which was formerly 
 wasted in idleness or dissipation. Temperance and social 
 harmony are irresistibly forwarded. Nor is it a question of a 
 few able men imposing their will on the many, or of an artificial, 
 State-aided process. Though the language has obtained a 
 footing in more than a third of the State schools and in the 
 National University,* the motive force behind it comes from 
 the people themselves. In the country district, with which I 
 am best acquainted, boys and girls from very poor families 
 are clubbing together to pay instructors in the Irish language 
 and dances, and the same thing is going on all over Ireland. 
 
 The brilliant modern school of poets and playwrights who, 
 steeped in the old Celtic thought and culture, have found for 
 it such an exquisite vehicle in the English tongue, speak for 
 themselves and are winning their own way to renown. The 
 only criticism I venture to make is that some of them are too 
 much inclined to look backward instead of forward, to idealize 
 the far past rather than to illuminate the future, and to de- 
 
 * On December 31, 1909, Irish was taught as an " extra subject" in 3,006 
 primary schools out of 8,401, and in 161 schools in Irish-speaking districts in 
 the West a bi-lingual programme of instruction was in force (Eeport of Com- 
 mittee of National Education, 1910). Forty-six thousand pupils passed the 
 test of the inspectors. Irish in 1910 was made a compulsory subject for 
 matriculation at the National University.
 
 168 THE FRAMEWOBK OF HOME RULE 
 
 linoato tho deformities of national character produced by ages of 
 repression, rather than to aid in conjuring into being a virile, 
 normal nation. 
 
 The name of the last movement to be referred to sums up 
 all the others, Sinn Fein. Unlike the others, it had a purely 
 political origin, and for that reason, probably, never made the 
 same progress. Yet the explanation is simple. In pursuance 
 of the general purpose of inspiring Irishmen to rely on them- 
 selves for their own salvation, economic and spiritual, Sinn 
 Feiners, like John Mitchel and others in the past, and like 
 the Hungarian patriots, attacked, with much point and satire, 
 the whole policy of constitutional and Parliamentary agita- 
 tion for Home Rule. The policy, they said, had failed for half 
 a century ; it was not only negative and barren, but positively 
 harmful. Nationalists should refuse to send Members to West- 
 minster and abide by the consequences. Sensibly enough, 
 most Irishmen, while recognizing that there was an element of 
 indisputable and valuable truth in this bold diagnosis, decided 
 that it was premature to adopt the prescription. Public 
 opinion in Britain was slowly changing, and confidence existed 
 that this opinion would be finally converted. If the Sinn 
 Fein alternative meant anything at all, it meant complete 
 separation, which Ireland does not want, and a final abandon- 
 ment of constitutional methods. If another Home Rule Bill 
 were to fail, Sinn Fein would undoubtedly redouble its strength. 
 Its ideas are sane and sound. They are at bottom exactly 
 the ideas which actuate every progressive and spirited com- 
 munity, and which in Ireland animate the Industrial Develop- 
 ment Associations, the Co-operative movement, the thirst for 
 technical instruction, the Gaelic League, the literary revival, 
 and the work of the only truly Irish organ of government, the 
 Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. 
 
 Now, where do we stand ? Are the phenomena I have 
 reviewed arguments for Home Rule or against Home Rule ? 
 Do they tend to show that Ireland is " fitter " now for Home 
 Rule, or that she manages very well without Home Rule ? 
 These are superfluous questions. They are never asked save 
 of countries obviously designed to govern themselves and 
 obstinately denied the right. Who would say now of Canada 
 or Australia that they ought to have solved their economic,
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 169 
 
 agrarian, and religious problems and have evolved an in- 
 digenous literature before they were declared fit for Home 
 Rule, or still more unreasonable proposition that their 
 strenuous efforts after self-help and internal harmony in the 
 teeth of political disabilities proved, in so far as they were 
 successful, that external government was a success ? 
 
 Yet these questions were, as a fact, asked of the Colonies, 
 as they are asked of Ireland. And misgovernment increased, 
 and passions rose, and blood flowed, while, in the guise of dis- 
 passionate psychologists, a great many narrow, egotistical, and 
 bullying people at home propounded these arid conundrums. 
 Where is our common sense ? The Irish phenomena I have 
 described arise in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the 
 denial of Home Rule sets an absolute and final bar to progress 
 beyond a certain point. 
 
 That is certain ; one cannot live in Ireland with one's eyes 
 and ears open without realizing it. All social and economic 
 effort, successful as it is up to a certain point, and strong as 
 its tendency is to promote nationalist feeling of the noblest 
 kind, has to struggle desperately against the benumbing influ- 
 ence of abstract " politics." Suspicion comes from both sides. 
 Both Unionists and Nationalists, for example, at one time or 
 another have looked askance on the Co-operative movement 
 and on the Department of Agriculture as being too Nationalist 
 or too Unionist in tendency. Unionists caused Sir Horace 
 Plunkett to lose his seat in Parliament in 1905 ; and 
 Nationalists, though with some constitutional justification, 
 secured his removal from office in 1907 At this moment there 
 is friction and suspicion in this particular matter which seems 
 to the impartial observer to be artificial, and which would not 
 exist, or would be transmuted into something perfectly harm- 
 less, and probably highly beneficial, were there any normal 
 political life in Ireland and a central organ of public opinion. 
 As long as Great Britain insists, to her own infinite incon- 
 venience, upon deciding Irish questions by party majorities 
 fluctuating from Toryism to Radicalism, and thereby compels 
 Ireland to send parties to Westminster whose raison d'etre 
 is, not to represent crystallized Irish opinion on Irish domestic 
 questions that is at present wholly impossible but to assert 
 or deny the fundamental right for Ireland to settle her own
 
 170 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 domestic questions, so long will these dislocations continue, to the 
 grave prejudice of Ireland and the deep discredit of Great Britain. 
 Ireland, like Canada in 1838, has no organic national life. 
 Apart from the abstract but paramount question of Home 
 Rule, there are no formed political principles or parties. Such 
 parties as there are have no relation to the economic life of 
 the country, and all interests suffer daily in consequence. 
 In a normal country you would find urban and agricultural 
 interests distinctly represented, but not in Ireland. We should 
 expect to find clear-cut opinions on Tariff Reform and Free 
 Trade. No such opinions exist. On the other hand, agree- 
 ment on important industrial and agricultural questions finds 
 not the smallest reflection in Parliamentary representation. 
 Education, and other latent issues of burning importance, are 
 not political issues. A Budget may cause almost universal 
 dissatisfaction, but it goes through, and the amazing thing 
 is that Unionists complain of its going through ! Most of 
 the Parliamentary elections are uncontested, though everybody 
 knows that a dozen questions would set up a salutary ferment 
 of opinion if they were not stifled by the refusal of Home 
 Rule. The Protestant tenant-farmers of Ulster have identical 
 interests with those of other Provinces, and have profited 
 largely by the legislation extorted by Nationalists ; but 
 for the most part, though by no means wholly, they vote 
 Unionist. The two great towns, Dublin and Belfast, are 
 divided by the most irrational antagonism. Labourers, 
 both rural and urban, have distinct and important interests ; 
 the rural labourers have no spokesman, the town-labourers 
 only one. It was admitted to me by a Unionist organizer 
 in Belfast that that city, but for the Home Rule issue, would 
 probably return four labour members. Nor have parties 
 any close relation to the distribution of wealth. In the matter 
 of incomes the prosperous traders of Cork, Limerick, and 
 Waterford are in the same case as regards taxation with those 
 of Londonderry and Belfast. Publicans are Unionists in 
 England, Nationalists in Ireland, both in Ulster and elsewhere. 
 Before the Home Rule issue was raised, Ulster was largely 
 Liberal. Ulster Liberalism is almost dead. Extreme Socialism 
 may almost be said to be non-existent in Ireland, yet Ireland 
 is not only administered on semi-collectivist principles, but
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 171 
 
 continually runs the risk of being involved in legislation of 
 a Socialistic kind, which, rightly or wrongly, she heartily 
 dislikes. 
 
 As for the landed aristocracy all over Ireland, their historic 
 alliance with the intensely democratic tenant-farmers of one 
 small corner of Ireland, North-East Ulster, against those of all 
 the rest, presented strange enough features in the past, and 
 is now becoming artificial in the highest degree. Thanks to 
 Land Purchase, no landed aristocracy in the world now has a 
 better chance of throwing its wealth and intelligence into 
 public life for the good of the whole country, of thinking out 
 problems, of conciliating factions, and of ennobling public 
 life. The landlord who has sold his land is a free man, far 
 freer than the English landlord from misgivings caused by 
 divergency of interest. The opportunity is still there. Will 
 they profit by it ? One thing is essential : they must become 
 Nationalists, and in breathing that phrase, one is conscious of 
 all the misleading implications and the bitter historical feuds 
 it suggests. Yet a small but powerful group of landlords is 
 already leading the way. And the way, even before Home 
 Rule, in reality is so simple. I speak from close observation. 
 If a man is a good man, and worthy to represent a con- 
 stituency, he has only to declare his belief that he thinks that 
 he and his own fellow-citizens are fit to govern themselves. 
 Irishmen, especially in Roman Catholic districts, and, indeed, 
 as an indirect result of Catholicism, have never lost their 
 belief in aristocracy. When a landlord, or any other Protestant, 
 comes forward as a Nationalist, he is welcomed. His religion, 
 whatever it may be, does not count. Parnell and Smith O'Brien 
 were Protestant landlords. Many of the most trusted popular 
 leaders, Tone, Robert Emmet, John Mitchel, Isaac Butt, 
 and others in the past have been Protestants. Ten Members 
 of the present Nationalist party are Protestants. The Home 
 Rule issue would have lost some of its bitterness if a Unionist 
 electorate had ever elected a Catholic to Parliament. 
 
 Still, it is unfortunately true that the great bulk of the 
 landlords and ex-landlords stand aloof from the Home Rule 
 movement. The collateral result is that far too many of them 
 instinctively stand aloof even from those purely economic 
 and intellectual movements which tend to make a living united
 
 172 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Ireland out of chaos. The national loss is heavy ; the waste 
 of talent and of driving-power, for Ireland needs driving-power 
 from her leisured and cultured classes, is melancholy to con- 
 template. 
 
 Everywhere one sees waste of talent in Ireland. The land 
 abounds in men with ideas and potentialities waiting for 
 those normal chances of development which self-governed 
 countries provide. Much of this good material is crushed 
 under unnatural political tyrannies caused by ceaseless agita- 
 tion for and against an abstract aim which should have been 
 satisfied long ago, so that the energies it absorbed might have 
 been diverted into practical channels. There is too much 
 moral cowardice, too little bold, independent thought and 
 action. Nobody knows what Ireland really is, and of what 
 she is capable. Nobody can know until she has responsibility 
 for her own fate. 
 
 Local government, where popular opinion is nominally 
 free, suffers from the absence of free central government. 
 Is it not on the face of it preposterous to give complete 
 powers of local taxation and administration to a country 
 while withholding from it, as unsafe and improper, central 
 co-ordinating control ? For any country but Ireland at 
 any rate, in the British self-governing Colonies and the United 
 States such a policy would be regarded as crazy. Still 
 more unreasonable is it to complain that local authorities 
 under such a system spend part of the energy which should 
 be devoted wholly to local affairs in abstract politics. I 
 forbear from engaging in the statistical war over the numbers 
 of Catholics and Protestants employed and elected by local 
 bodies. One must remember, what Unionists sometimes 
 forget, that Ireland is, broadly speaking, a Roman Catholic 
 country, and that until thirteen years ago local administration 
 and patronage were almost exclusively in Protestant hands. 
 We should naturally expect a marked change ; but, with that 
 reminder, I prefer to appeal to the reader's common sense. 
 Deny national Home Rule, and give local Home Rule. What 
 would one expect to happen ? What would have happened 
 in any Colony ? What would Mr. Arthur Balfour himself 
 have prophesied with certainty in the case of any other country 
 but Ireland ? Why, this, that each little local body would
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 173 
 
 become an outlet for suppressed agitation, and that national 
 or anti-national politics, not urgent local necessities, would 
 enter into local elections and influence the composition of 
 local bodies. And what would be the further consequence ? 
 That numbers of the best local men would stand aloof or be 
 rejected, and that favouritism would find a congenial soil. 
 
 In point of fact, Irish local authorities, under the circum- 
 stances, are wonderfully free from these evils, only another 
 proof of the resilience and vitality of the country under per- 
 sistent mismanagement. On the whole they bear comparison 
 with British local authorities in thrift, purity, and efficiency. 
 None of them has ever yet had a scandal like that of Poplar. 
 All of them have shown sense and spirit in forwarding sanita- 
 tion and technical education. They vary widely, of course, 
 the lowest units in the scale being the least efficient, as in 
 England. County Councils, for example, are better than 
 Rural District Councils. On the other hand, Dublin Corpora- 
 tion, though not so bad as it is sometimes painted, occasionally 
 sets a very bad example. The standard of efficiency is higher 
 in the Protestant north than in the Catholic south, the standard 
 of religious toleration lower. But at bottom it is not a ques- 
 tion of theology, as every well-informed person knows, but a 
 question of politics. The same causes that keep the landed 
 gentry out of Parliament keep them, although not to the same 
 degree, out of local politics. Sometimes this is their own 
 fault, for declining to take part in them ; for many of the 
 Protestant upper class in Nationalist districts obtain election 
 in spite of being Unionists. Tolerance is slowly growing in 
 Nationalist, though not, it is tc be feared, in Unionist, districts ; 
 again a quite intelligible fact.* But when all is said and 
 done, it is an undeniable fact that Irish local authorities, 
 especially those in the poverty-stricken west, where all social 
 activities are more retrograde than elsewhere, are capable of 
 great improvement, and that improvement can come only by 
 allowing them to concentrate on local affairs, and obtain 
 the co-operation of all classes and religions. The very exist- 
 ence of a central Government of which Irishmen were proud 
 
 * The election by Nationalist votes of Lord Ashtown, a militant Unionist 
 peer of the most uncompromising type, hi the spring of 1911 to one of the 
 Galway District Councils is a good recent example of this tendency.
 
 174 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 would influence the tone and standard of all minor authorities 
 to the bottom of the scale. 
 
 Meanwhile, obvious and urgent problems, which no Parlia- 
 ment but an Irish Parliament can deal with, cry aloud for 
 settlement. The Poor Law, railways, arterial drainage, 
 afforestation, are questions which I need only refer to by name, 
 confining myself to the greater issues. Education, primary and 
 intermediate, is perhaps the greatest. The present system is 
 almost universally condemned, and its bad results are recognized. 
 It has got to be reformed. By no possibility can it be reformed 
 so long as the Union lasts, not only because the Boards, National 
 and Intermediate, which control education, are composed of un- 
 elected amateurs, but because there is no means of finding out 
 what the national opinion is as to the course reform is to take. 
 Meanwhile the children and the country suffer. The Intermediate 
 Board is a purely examining and prize-giving body, and its 
 system by general agreement is imperfect. In the National or 
 Primary schools the percentage of average daily attendance 
 (71-1 per cent.), though slowly improving, is still very bad.* 
 Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the Com- 
 missioners, " mere hovels," unsanitary, leaky, ill- ventilated. 
 The distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful. 
 Out of 8,401 schools (in 1 90 9- 10) t nearly two hundred have 
 an average daily attendance of less than fifteen pupils. In 
 1730 the number is less than thirty, and it is not only in sparsely 
 inhabited country districts, but in big towns, that the distribu- 
 tion is bad. The power of the Commissioners to stop the 
 creation of unduly small schools, and even semi-bogus establish- 
 ments which come into being in the great cities, is imperfect. 
 Another example of the curious mixture of anarchy and 
 despotism that the system of Irish government presents may 
 be seen in the Annual Report of the Commissioners. With 
 a mutinous audacity which would be laughable, if the case 
 were one for laughing, the Commissioners openly rail at 
 the Treasury for the parsimony of its grants, and, in order to 
 stir its compassion, paint the condition of Irish education in 
 black colours. Imagine the various Departmental Ministers 
 
 * Permissive powers exist for County Councils to enforce compulsory 
 attendance. 
 
 t Including 342 convent, 54 monastery, 125 workhouse, and 71 model 
 schools
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 173 
 
 in Great Britain publicly attacking in their Annual Reports 
 the Cabinet of which they were members ! The Treasury, 
 needless to say, is not to blame. It pays out of the common 
 Imperial purse all but a negligible fraction of the cost of 
 primary education in Ireland. Nothing is raised by rates, and 
 only 141,096 (in 1909-10) from voluntary and local sources, as 
 compared with 1,688,547 from State grants. The Treasury 
 has no guarantee that this money is well spent ; on the con- 
 trary, it knows from the Reports of the Commissioners them- 
 selves that a great deal of it is very badly spent. The business 
 is a comic opera, but it has a tragic significance for Ireland. 
 Primary education is so bad that a great number of the pupils 
 are absolutely unfit to receive the expensive and excellent 
 technical instruction organized by the Department of Agri- 
 culture and Technical Instruction, and contributed to by the 
 ratepayers. The Belfast Technical Institute, for example, 
 has to go outside its proper functions, and spend from its too 
 small stock in providing introductory courses in elementary 
 subjects, so as to equip children for the reception of higher 
 knowledge.* All over the country the complaint is the same. 
 No machinery whatever exists for co-ordinating primary, 
 secondary, technical, and University education, and oppor- 
 tioning funds in an economical and profitable manner. 
 
 Religion is the immediate cause of the trouble ; absence 
 of popular control the fundamental cause. The national 
 system of primary education, designed originally in 1831 to 
 be undenominational, has become rigidly denominational. 
 Out of 8,401 primary schools, 2,461 only are attended by both 
 Protestants and Roman Catholics. The rest are of an ex- 
 clusively sectarian character. Even the Protestants do not 
 combine. The Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, the 
 Methodists, and other smaller denominations, frequently have 
 small separate schools in the same parish. The management 
 (save in the model schools, which are attended only by Protes- 
 tants) is exclusively sectarian, the local clergyman, Roman 
 Catholic, Church of Ireland, or Nonconformist having almost 
 autocratic control over the school. 
 
 This education question has got to be thrashed out by a 
 
 * See " Prospectus of the Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast," 1910-11, 
 pp. 55 and 57-58. Reading, Grammar, and Simple Arithmetic are taught.
 
 176 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Home Ruled Ireland, and the sooner the better. After Home 
 Rule the Treasury grant will stop, and Ireland will have to 
 raise and apportion the funds herself, and set her house in 
 order. At whatever sacrifice of religious scruples, and, it is 
 needless to add that to the Roman Catholic hierarchy the 
 sacrifice will be the greatest, the Irish people must control 
 and finance its schools, whether through a central depart- 
 ment alone, or through local authorities as well. There is 
 no reason in the world why a compromise should not be arrived 
 at which would secure vastly increased efficiency and leave 
 the teaching of denominational religion uninjured. Other 
 countries, where the same religions exist side by side, have 
 attained that compromise. Ireland will be judged by her 
 success in attaining it. 
 
 Another important question is the treatment of the Con- 
 gested Districts. More than a third of Ireland is now under 
 the benevolent jurisdiction of a despotic Board.* So long as 
 its funds are raised from general Imperial taxation, the in- 
 evitable tendency is to shirk the thorough discussion of this 
 grave subject, to lay the responsibility on Great Britain, to 
 acquiesce in a policy of extreme paternalism, and to appeal 
 for higher and higher doles from the Treasury. This cannot 
 go on. Whoever, in the eyes of Divine Justice, was originally 
 responsible for the condition of the submerged west, and for 
 the ruin of the evicted tenants, Ireland, if she wants Home 
 Rule, must shoulder the responsibility herself, and think 
 out the whole question independently. The Congested Dis- 
 tricts Board has done, and continues to do, good work in 
 the purchase and resettlement of estates ; but even in this 
 sphere there are wide differences of opinion as to the proper 
 methods and policy to be employed, especially with regard 
 to the division of grasslands and the migration of landless men. 
 Its other remedial work (part of which is now taken over by 
 the Department of Agriculture under the Land Act of 1909), 
 in encouraging fisheries, industries, and farm improvements 
 out of State money, is open to criticism on the ground of its 
 tendency to pauperize and weaken character. I do not care 
 to pronounce on the controversy, though I think that there 
 is much to be said for the view that money is best spent 
 
 * See Report of the Congested Districts Board, 1909-11.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 177 
 
 by encouraging agricultural co-operation. Many able and 
 distinguished men have devoted their minds to the subject, 
 but it is plain that Ireland as a whole has not thought, and 
 cannot think, the matter out in a responsible spirit, and that 
 the only way of reaching a truly Irish decision is through an 
 Irish Parliament, which both raises and votes money for the 
 purpose.* The reinstatement of evicted tenants teems with 
 practical difficulties which can only be solved hi the same way. 
 As long as Great Britain remains responsible, errors are liable 
 to be made which one day may be deeply regretted. 
 
 The same observation applies to all future land legislation, 
 not excepting Land Purchase, which I deal with fully in a 
 later chapter, j That great department of administration must, 
 for financial reasons, be worked in harmonious consultation 
 with the British Government ; but it ought to be controlled 
 by Ireland, and a free and normal outlet given to criticisms 
 like those emanating from Mr. William O'Brien, whatever the 
 intrinsic value of these criticisms. Purchase itself settles 
 nothing beyond the bare ownership of the land. It leaves 
 the distribution and use of the land, except in the " resettled " 
 districts, where it was, with a third or a quarter of the holdings 
 so small as to be classed as " uneconomic." Ireland is not as 
 yet awake to the possibilities of the silent revolution proceed- 
 ing from the erection of a small peasant proprietorship. The 
 sense of responsibility in these new proprietors will be quickened 
 and the interests of the whole country forwarded by a National 
 Parliament. 
 
 Temperance will never be tackled thoroughly but by an 
 Irish Parliament. All Irishmen are ashamed in their hearts 
 of the encouragement given to drunkenness by the still grossly 
 excessive number of licensed houses, which in 1909 was 22,591, 
 and of the National Drink Bill, which in the same year was 
 13,310,469, + or 3 lid. per head of a population not rich in 
 this world's goods. Temperance is not really a party or a 
 sectarian question. All the Churches make noble efforts to 
 
 * See Report of Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland (Cd. 4097) ; 
 especially a Memorandum by Sir Horace Plunkett, published as a separate 
 pamphlet by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. 
 
 f See Chapter XIV. 
 
 J Annual Report (1910) of the " Irish Association for the Prevention of 
 Intemperance." The estimate is that of Dr. Dawson Burns. By the 
 Licensing (Ireland) Act of 1902, the issue of any new licenses was prohibited. 
 
 12
 
 178 
 
 forward reform, and in a rationally governed Ireland reform 
 would be considered on its merits. At present it is inextricably 
 mixed up with Nationalist and anti-Nationalist politics, and 
 with irrelevant questions of Imperial taxation. 
 
 The latest examples of the embarrassment into which Ireland 
 without Home Rule is liable to drift from the absence of a 
 formed public opinion and the means to give it effect, are the 
 labour troubles and the National Insurance scheme. There 
 are signs that English labour is thrusting forward Irish labour 
 in advance of its own will and in advance of general Irish 
 opinion. In all labour questions Ireland's position as an 
 agricultural country is totally different from that of Great 
 Britain. The same legislation cannot be applicable to both. 
 Ireland should frame her own. Under present conditions it 
 is impossible to know the considered judgment of Ireland. 
 There is certainly much opposition to Insurance, and if all 
 Irishmen thoroughly realized that the scheme might complicate 
 the finance of Home Rule and involve a greater financial depend- 
 ence on Great Britain than exists even at present, they would 
 study it with still more critical eyes, * as they would certainly 
 have studied the Old Age Pensions scheme with more critical 
 eyes. 
 
 Here I am led naturally to the great and all-embracing 
 questions of Irish finance and expenditure, which lie behind all 
 the topics already discussed and many others. The subject 
 is far too important and interwoven with history to be dealt 
 with otherwise than as an historical whole, and that course I 
 propose to take in a later part of the book. Ifc is enough to 
 say that all the arguments for Home Rule are summed up in 
 the fiscal argument. Every Irishman worth his salt ought to 
 be ashamed and indignant at the present position. 
 
 The whole machinery of Irish Government, and the whole 
 fiscal system under which Ireland lives, need to be thoroughly 
 overhauled by Irishmen in their own interests, and in the 
 interests of Great Britain. Among many other writers, 
 Mr. Barry O'Brien, in his " Dublin Castle and the Irish People," 
 Lord Dunraven in " The Outlook in Ireland," and Mr. G. F.-H. 
 Berkeley in a paper contributed to " Home Rule Problems," 
 have lucidly and wittily described the wonderful collection of 
 
 * I write before the scheme has been fully discussed in Parliament.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 179 
 
 sixty-seven irresponsible and unrelated Boards nominated by 
 the Chief Secretary, or Lord-Lieutenant, which, with the 
 official services beneath them, constitute the colonial beurau- 
 cracy of Ireland ; the extravagance of the judicial and 
 other salaries, and the total lack of any central control worthy 
 of the name. By omitting a number of insignificant little 
 bureaux, the figure 67, according to Mr. Berkeley's classifica- 
 tion, may be reduced to 42, of which 26 are directly under 
 Castle influence, and the rest either branches of British Depart- 
 ments or directly under the Treasury. In 1906, out of 1,611 
 principal official posts, 626 were obtained purely by nomina- 
 tion, and 766 by a qualifying examination only. In an able- 
 bodied male population, which we may estimate at a million, 
 there are reckoned to be about 60,000 persons employed by 
 the State, or 1 in 18. If we add 180,000 Old Age Pensioners, 
 we reach the figure of nearly a quarter of a million persons, 
 out of a total population of under four and a half millions, 
 dependent wholly or partially for their living on the State, 
 exclusive of Army and Navy pensioners ; again about 1 in 18. 
 Four millions of money are paid in salaries or pensions to State 
 employees, and two and three-quarter millions to Old Age 
 Pensioners. 
 
 It is so easy to make fun about Irish administration that 
 one has to be cautious not to mistake the nature or exaggerate 
 the dimensions of the evil. The great defect is that the ex- 
 penditure is not controlled by Ireland and has no relation to the 
 revenue derived from Ireland. The Castle is not the odious 
 institution that it was in the dark days of the land war ; but 
 it is still a foreign, not an Irish institution, working, like the 
 Government of the most dependent of Crown Colonies, in a 
 world of its own, with autocratic powers, and immunity from 
 all popular influence. Beyond the criticism that one religious 
 denomination, the Church of Ireland, is rather unduly favoured 
 in patronage, there is no personal complaint against the 
 officials. They are as able, kindly, hard-working, and courteous 
 as any other officials. Some of the principal posts are held 
 by men of the highest distinction, who will be as necessary to 
 the new Government as to the old. It is absolutely essential, 
 but it will not be easy, to make substantial administrative 
 economies at the outset, not only from the additional stress
 
 180 THE FRAMEWOEK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of novel work which will be thrown upon a Home Rule 
 Government, but from the widespread claims of vested 
 interests. It will require courageous statesmanship, backed 
 by courageous public opinion, to overhaul a bureaucracy so 
 old and extensive. Take the police, for example, the first 
 and most urgent subject for reduction. Adding the Royal 
 Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police together, 
 we have a force of no less than 12,000 officers and men, a 
 force twice as numerous in proportion to population as those 
 of England and Wales, and costing the huge sum of a million 
 and a half ; and this in a country which now is unusually free 
 from crime, and which at all times has been naturally less 
 disposed to crime than any part of Great Britain. It is the 
 forcible maintenance of bad economic conditions that has pro- 
 duced Irish crime in the past. Irishmen hotly resent that symbol 
 of coercion, the swollen police force, which is as far removed 
 from their own control as a foreign army of occupation. On 
 the other hand, the force itself is composed of Irishmen, and 
 is a considerable, though an unhealthy, economic factor in 
 the life of the country. It performs some minor official duties 
 outside the domain of justice ; it is efficient, and its individual 
 members are not unpopular. Reduction will be difficult. But 
 drastic reduction, at least by a half, must eventually be 
 brought about if Ireland is to hold up her head in the face of 
 the world. 
 
 The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of 
 public expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, 
 against her persistent protests, has been retained in a position 
 which is destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials 
 has produced an unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. 
 No one feels responsibility for the money spent for national 
 purposes, because no one in Ireland is, in any real sense, 
 responsible. There is no Irish Budget or Irish Exchequer 
 to make a separate Irish Government logically defensible. 
 The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not connect 
 their taxes with the expenditure going on around them. On 
 the contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain 
 as the source of grants, salaries, pensions. 
 
 And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being 
 financially dependent on Great Britain. After more than a
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 181 
 
 century of Union finance, after contributing, all told, over 
 three hundred and twenty millions of money to the Imperial 
 purse over and above expenditure in Ireland, they have now 
 ceased to contribute a penny, and are a little in debt. As we 
 shall see, when I come to a closer examination of finance, the 
 main factor in producing this result has been the Old Age 
 Pensions. The application of the British scale, unmodified, 
 to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union encourages. 
 Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far lower 
 than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and 
 already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was 
 an unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it 
 has gravely compromised Home Rule finance. 
 
 For acquiescing in this and similar grants, beyond the ascer- 
 tained taxable resources of the country ; for the general 
 deficiency of public spirit and matured public opinion in 
 Ireland ; for the backwardness of education, temperance 
 legislation, and other important reforms, the Irish Parlia- 
 mentary parties cannot be held responsible. They are abnormal 
 in their composition and aims, and, beyond a certain limited 
 point, they are powerless, even if they had the will, to promote 
 Irish policies. That is the pernicious result of an unsatisfied 
 claim for self-government. It is the same everywhere else. 
 While an agitation for self-government lasts, a country is 
 stagnant, retrograde, or, like Ireland, progressive only by dint 
 of extraordinary native exertions. Read the Durham report 
 on the condition of the Canadas during the long agitation for 
 Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of things. 
 The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract 
 and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissi- 
 pate their energies on minor ends. Yet they, too, are liable 
 to irrational and painful divisions, like that which divides 
 Mr. O'Brien from Mr. Redmond ; symptoms of irritation in 
 the body politic, not of political sanity. They cannot prove 
 their powers of constructive statesmanship, because they are 
 not given the power to construct or the responsibility which 
 evokes statesmanship. The anti - Home Rule partisans 
 degenerate into violent but equally sincere upholders of a pure 
 negation. 
 
 Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties
 
 182 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 will, it is to bo hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and 
 practical field for their abilities in a free Ireland. But the 
 parties, as such, will disappear, on condition that the measure 
 of Home Rule given to Ireland is adequate. On that point 
 I shall have more to say later. If it is adequate, and Irish 
 politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics, the structure of 
 the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense advantage 
 both of Ireland including the Protestant sections of Ulster 
 and of Great Britain. At present both parties, divided 
 normally by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain 
 limited purposes of Irish legislation, but both are, in different 
 degrees and ways, sterile. The policy of the Nationalist party 
 has been positive in the past, because it wrung from Parlia- 
 ment the land legislation which saved a perishing society. 
 It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule, which 
 is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland. 
 More, the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied 
 to no other party in the United Kingdom. Its Members accept 
 no offices or titles, the ordinary prizes of political life. But 
 they themselves could not contend that they are truly repre- 
 sentative of three-quarters of Ireland in any other sense 
 than that they are Home Rulers. Half of the wit, brains, 
 and eloquence of their best men runs to waste. Some 
 of them are merely nominated by the party machine, to 
 represent, not local needs, but a paramount principle which 
 the electors insist rightly on setting above immediate local 
 needs. 
 
 The purpose of the Irish Unionist party in the Commons 
 is purely negative, to defeat Home Rule. It does not represent 
 North-East Ulster, or any other fragment of Ireland, hi any 
 sense but that. It is passionately sentimental and absolutely 
 unrepresentative of the practical, virile genius of Ulster in- 
 dustry. The Irish Unionist peers, in addition to voicing the 
 same negative, are for the most part the spokesmen of a small 
 minority of Irishmen in whom the long habit of upholding 
 landlord interests has begun to outlive the need. 
 
 I have said little directly about the problem of modern 
 Ulster, not because I underrate its importance, which is very 
 great, but because I have some hope that my arguments up 
 to this point may be perceived to have a strong, though
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 183 
 
 indirect, bearing upon it.* The religious question I leave 
 to others, with only these few observations. It is impossible 
 to make out a historical case for the religious intolerance of 
 Roman Catholics in Ireland, or a practical case for the likeli- 
 hood of a Roman Catholic tyranny in the future. No attempt 
 which can be described as even plausible has ever been made 
 in either direction. The late Mr. Lecky, a Unionist historian, 
 and one of the most eminent thinkers and writers of our tune, 
 has nobly vindicated Catholic Ireland, banishing both the 
 theory and the fear into the domain of myth.f 
 
 He has shown, what, indeed, nobody denies, that, from the 
 measures which provoked the Rebellion of 1641, through the 
 Penal Code, to the middle of the nineteenth century, intoler- 
 ance, inspired by supposed political necessities, and of a ferocity 
 almost unequalled in history, came from the Protestant 
 colonists. In that brilliant little essay of his Nationalist youth, 
 "Clerical Influences" (1861), he described the sectarian ani- 
 mosity which was raging at that period as " the direct and in- 
 evitable consequence of the Union," and wrote as follows : 
 " Much has been said of the terrific force with which it would 
 rage were the Irish Parliament restored. We maintain, on the 
 other hand, that no truth is more clearly stamped upon the page 
 of history, and more distinctly deducible from the constitution 
 of the human mind, than that a national feeling is the only check 
 to sectarian passions." He was himself an anti-Catholic ex- 
 tremist in the sense of holding (with many others) that " the 
 logical consequences of the doctrines of the Church of Rome 
 would be fatal to an independent and patriotic policy in any 
 land." But he insists in the same passage " that nothing is 
 more clear than that in every land where a healthy national 
 feeling exists, Roman Catholic politicians are both independent 
 and patriotic." 
 
 He never recanted these opinions (which are confirmed 
 
 * It is scarcely necessary for me to remind the reader that the word 
 "Ulster," as used in current political dialectics, is misleading. Part of Ulster 
 is overwhelmingly Catholic ; in part the population is divided between the 
 two creeds, and in two counties it is overwhelmingly Protestant. In the 
 whole province the Protestants are in a majority of 150,000, but since a 
 number of Protestants vote Nationalist, the representation of the province is 
 almost equal, the Unionists holding seventeen seats out of thirty-three. 
 
 f "Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in 
 Ireland," " Clerical Influences."
 
 184 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 by the subsequent course of events) even after his conversion 
 to Unionism, but derived his opposition to Home Rule from 
 a dread of all democratic tendencies,* the only ground on which, 
 if men would be willing to confess the naked truth, it can be 
 opposed. There the matter ought to rest. If the doctrines 
 of the Church of Rome are, in fact, inconsistent with political 
 freedom I myself pronounce no opinion on that point it is 
 plain to the most superficial observer that the Church, as a 
 factor in politics, stands to lose rather than to gain by Home 
 Rule. British statesmen have often accepted that view, and 
 have endeavoured to use the Roman Catholic hierarchy against 
 popular movements, just as they enlisted its influence to secure 
 the Union. The Roman Catholic laity have often subse- 
 quently rejected what they have considered to be undue 
 political dictation from the seat of authority in Rome. 
 
 If I may venture an opinion, I believe that both of these 
 mutually irreconcilable propositions that Home Rule means 
 Rome Rule, and that Rome is the enemy to Home Rule 
 are wrong.f Such ludicrous contradictions only help to destroy 
 the case against trusting a free Ireland to give religion its legiti- 
 mate, and no more than legitimate, position in the State. 
 Ireland is intensely religious, and it would be a disaster of 
 the first magnitude if the Roman Catholic masses were to 
 lose faith in their Church. The preservation of that faith 
 depends on the political Liberalism of the Church. 
 
 Corresponding tolerance will be demanded of Ulster Protes- 
 tants. At present passion, not reason, governs the religious 
 side of their opposition to Home Rule. It is futile to 
 criticize Ulster Unionists for making the religious argument 
 the spear-head of their attack on Home Rule. The argument 
 is one which especially appeals to portions of the British 
 electorate, and the rules of political warfare permit free use of 
 it. It was pushed beyond the legitimate point, to actual 
 violence, in the Orange opposition to responsible government 
 in Canada in 1849. And it has more than once inflamed 
 and embittered Australian politics, as it inflames the politics of 
 
 * See " Democracy and Liberty." 
 
 f Many Unionists are to be found in the same breath prophesying Catholic 
 tyranny under Home Ilule and averring without any evidence that cleric a 
 influence caused the repudiation in 1907 of the Council Bill, because it placed 
 education under a semi-popular body.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 185 
 
 certain English constituencies. But it is hardly to be con- 
 ceived that Ulster Unionists really fear Roman Catholic tyranny. 
 The fear is unmanly and unworthy of them. To anyone who 
 has lived in an overwhelmingly Catholic district, and seen the 
 complete tranquillity and safety in which Protestants exercise 
 their religion, it seems painfully abnormal that a great city 
 like Belfast, with a population more than two-thirds Protes- 
 tant, should become hysterical over Catholic tyranny. It 
 would be physically impossible to enforce any tyrannical law 
 in Ulster or anywhere else, even if such a law were proposed, 
 and many leading Protestants from all parts of Ireland have 
 stated publicly that they have no fear of any such result from 
 Home Rule.* 
 
 " Loyalty " to the Crown is a false issue. Disloyalty to the 
 Crown is a negligible factor hi all parts of Ireland. Loyalty 
 or disloyalty to a certain political system is the real matter at 
 issue. At the present day the really serious objections to Home 
 Rule on the part of the leading Ulster Unionists seem to be 
 economic. They have built up thriving trades under the Union. 
 They have the closest business connections with Great Britain, 
 and a mutual fabric of credit. They cherish sincere and pro- 
 found apprehensions that their business prosperity will suffer 
 by any change in the form of government. To scoff at these 
 apprehensions is absurd and impolitic in the last degree. 
 But to reason against them is also an almost fruitless labour. 
 Those who feel them vaguely picture an Irish Parliament com- 
 posed of Home Rulers and Unionists, in the same proportion to 
 population as at present, and divided by the same bitter and 
 demoralizing feuds. But there will be no Home Rulers after 
 Home Rule, that is to say, if the Home Rule conceded is 
 sufficient. I believe that Ulster Unionists do not realize either 
 the beneficent transformation which will follow a change from 
 sentimental to practical politics in Ireland, as it has followed 
 a similar change in every other country in the Empire, or the 
 enormous weight which their own fine qualities and strong 
 economic position will give them in the settlement of Irish 
 questions. 
 
 Nor do they realize, I venture to think, that any Irish 
 
 * " Religious Intolerance under Home Rule : Some Opinions of Leading 
 Irish Protestants," pamphlet (1911) compiled by J. McVeagh, M.P.
 
 186 
 
 Government, however composed, will be a patriotic Government 
 pledged and compelled for its own credit and safety to do its 
 best for the interests of Ireland. I have never met an Irish- 
 man who was not proud of the northern industries, and it is 
 obvious that the industrial prosperity of the north is vital to 
 the fiscal and general interests of Ireland, just as the far 
 more wealthy mining interests of the Rand are vital to the 
 stability and prosperity of the Transvaal, and were regarded 
 as such and treated as such by the farmer majority of the 
 Transvaal after the grant of Home Rule. Those interests 
 have prospered amazingly since, and in that country, be it 
 remembered, volunteer British corps raised on the Rand had 
 been the toughest of all the British foes which the peasant 
 commandos had to meet in a war ended only four years before. 
 
 If the fears of Ulster took any concrete form, it would be 
 easier to combat them ; but they are unformulated, nebulous. 
 Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine what measure of oppression 
 could possibly be invented by the most malignant Irish 
 Government which would not recoil like a boomerang upon 
 those hi whose supposed interests it was framed. I shall 
 have to deal with this point again in discussing taxation, 
 and need here only remind the reader that Ulster is not a 
 Province, any part of which could possibly be injured by any 
 form of taxation which did not hit other Provinces equally. 
 
 It is the belief of Ulster Unionists that their prosperity 
 depends on the maintenance of the Union, but the belief 
 rests on no sound foundation. Rural emigration from Ulster, 
 even from the Protestant parts, has been as great as from 
 the rest of Ireland.* It is easy to point to a fall in 
 stocks when the Home Rule issue is uppermost, but such phe- 
 nomena occur in the case of big changes of government in 
 any country. They merely reflect the fact that certain 
 moneyed interests do, in fact, fear a change of government, 
 and whether those fears are irrational or not, the effect is the 
 same. It is an historical fact, on the other hand, that political 
 freedom in a white country, in the long run invariably promotes 
 
 * The Census of 1911 shows that the population of Ireland is still falling. 
 The province of Leinster, mainly Catholic, alone shows a small increase, 
 derived from the counties of Dublin (including Dublin City) and Kildare. 
 In Ulster, Down and Antrim, which include the city of Belfast, alone show 
 an increase, but not so great as that of County Dublin.
 
 IRELAND TO-DAY 187 
 
 industrial expansion and financial confidence. Canada is 
 one remarkable example, Australia is another. The Balkan 
 States are others. Not that I wish to push the colonial 
 example to extremes. Vast undeveloped territories impair 
 the analogy to Ireland ; but it is none the less true that when 
 a country with a separate economic life of its own obtains 
 rulers of its own choice, and gains a national pride and re- 
 sponsibility, it goes ahead, not backward. 
 
 Intense, indeed, must be the racial prejudice which can 
 cause Ulstermeii to forget the only really glorious memories 
 of their past. Orange memories are stirring, but they are not 
 glorious beside the traditions of the Volunteers. The Orange 
 flag is the symbol of conquest, confiscation, racial and religious 
 ascendancy. It is not noble for Irishmen to celebrate annually 
 a battle in which Ireland was defeated, or to taunt their 
 Catholic compatriots with agrarian lawlessness to which their 
 own forefathers were forced to resort, in order to obtain a 
 privileged immunity from the same scandalous land laws. 
 Ulstermen reached spiritual greatness when, like true patriots, 
 they stood for tolerance, Parliamentary reform, and the unity 
 of Ireland. They fell, surely, when they consented to style 
 themselves a " garrison " under the shelter of an absentee 
 Parliament, which, through the enslavement and degradation 
 of the old Irish Parliment, had driven tens of thousands of 
 their own race into exile and rebellion. 
 
 They cherish the Imperial tradition, but let them love its 
 sublime and reject its ignoble side. It is sublime where it 
 stands for liberty ; ignoble and none knew this better than the 
 Ulster- American rebels where it stands for government based 
 on the dissensions of the governed. 
 
 The verdict of history is that for men in the position of the 
 Ulster Unionists, the path of honour and patriotism, and 
 the path of true self-interest, lies in co-operation with their 
 fellow-citizens for the attainment of political freedom under 
 the Crown. It is not as if they had to create a tradition. The 
 tradition lives.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE FEAMEWOBK OF HOME RULE 
 
 I. 
 THE ELEMENTS OF THE PROBLEM. 
 
 IT was not only to support the principle of Home Rule for 
 Ireland that I followed in some detail the growth of the Liberal 
 principle of government as applied to outlying portions of the 
 British Empire. The historical circumstances which moulded 
 the form of each individual Colonial Constitution, the Con- 
 stitutions themselves, and the modifications they have subse- 
 quently undergone, supply a mass of material rich in interest 
 and instruction for the makers of an Irish Constitution. Nor 
 is the analogy academical. Ireland is at this moment under 
 a form of government unique, so far as I know, in the whole 
 world, but resembling more closely than anything else that 
 of a British Crown Colony where the Executive is outside 
 popular control, and the Legislature is only partially within it ; 
 with this additional and crowning inconvenience, that the 
 Irish Crown Colony can obstruct the business of the Mother 
 Country. What we have to do is to liberate Great Britain 
 and to give Ireland a rational Constitution not pedantically 
 adhering to any colonial model, but recognizing that, however 
 closely her past history resembles that of a Colony, Ireland, 
 by her geographical position, has a closer community of interest 
 with Great Britain than that of any Colony. 
 
 Three main difficulties have to be contended with : first, 
 that the system to be overthrown is so ancient, and the pre- 
 judice against Home Rule so inveterate ; second, the Irish are 
 not agreed upon any constructive scheme ; third, the confusion 
 in the popular mind between " Federal " and other systems 
 of Home Rule. 
 
 188
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 189 
 
 A. 
 
 With regard to the first of these obstacles, we have got to 
 make a big national effort to take a sensible and dispassionate 
 view of the whole problem. We must cease to regard Ireland 
 as an insubordinate captive, as a " possession " to be exploited 
 for profit, or as a child to be humoured and spoiled. All this 
 is vieux jeu. It belongs to an utterly discredited form of so- 
 called Imperialism, which might more fitly be called Little 
 Englandism, masquerading in the showy trappings of Bis- 
 marckian philosophy. We have gone too far in the "dis- 
 memberment " of our historic Empire, and near enough to 
 the dismemberment of what remains, to apply this worn-out 
 metaphor to the process of making Ireland politically free. 
 
 In Ireland we must build on trust, or we build on sand. 
 
 What is best for Ireland will be best for the Empire. 
 
 Let us firmly grasp these principles, or we shall fail. They 
 may be carried to the extreme point. If it were for Ireland's 
 moral and material good to become an independent nation, 
 it would be Great Britain's interest to encourage her to secede 
 and assume the position of a small State like Belgium, whose 
 independence in our own interests we guarantee. Since nobody 
 of sense, in or out of Ireland supposes that her interest lies 
 in that direction, we need not consider the point ; but it is 
 just as well to bear in mind that a prosperous and friendly 
 neighbour on a footing of independence is better than a dis- 
 contented and backward neighbour on a footing of dependence. 
 The corollary is this that any restrictions or limitations upon 
 the subordinate Irish Government and Parliament which are 
 not scientifically designed to secure the easy working of the 
 whole Imperial machinery, but are the outcome of suspicion 
 and distrust, will serve only to aggravate existing evils. When 
 the supreme object of a Home Rule measure is to create a 
 sense of responsibility in the people to whom it is extended, 
 what could be more perversely unwise than to accompany 
 the gift with a declaration of the incompetence of the people 
 to exercise responsibility, and with restraints designed to prevent 
 them from proving the contrary ? 
 
 Centuries of experience have not yet secured general accepta- 
 tion for this simple principle. In this domain of thought the
 
 190 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 tenacity of error is marvellous, even if we make full allowance 
 for the disturbing effect on men's minds of India and other 
 coloured dependencies where despotic, or semi-despotic, 
 systems are in vogue. Since the expansion of England began 
 in the seventeenth century, it cannot be said that the principle 
 of trusting white races to manage their own affairs has ever 
 received the express and conscious sanction of a united British 
 people. It has been repeatedly repudiated by Governments 
 in the most categorical terms, and repudiated sometimes to 
 the point of bloodshed. In other cases it has met with lazy 
 retrospective acquiescence on the discovery that powers 
 surreptitiously obtained or granted without formal legislation 
 had not been abused. The Australian Acts of 1850 and 1855 
 were the first approach to a spontaneous application of the 
 full principle ; but even then many statesmen were not fully 
 alive to the consequences of their action, while there was no 
 public interest, and very little Parliamentary interest, in the 
 fate of these remote dependencies. The fully developed 
 modern doctrine of comradeship with the great self-governing 
 Dominions, a doctrine which we may date from the accession 
 of Mr. Chamberlain to Colonial Secretaryship in 1895, was 
 not the natural outcome of a belief in self-government, but a 
 sudden and effusive acceptation of its matured results in certain 
 definite cases. Irish Home Rule itself had, in the preceding 
 decade, twice been rejected by the nation. With the first oppor- 
 tunity, after 1895, of testing belief in the principle, namely, 
 in the Transvaal Constitution of 1905, the Government failed. 
 Finally, in 1906, when, to redeem that failure, for the first 
 time in the whole history of the Empire a Cabinet spontaneously 
 and unreservedly declared its full belief in the principle, and 
 translated that belief into law, the whole of the Opposition, 
 representing nearly half the electorate, washed their hands of 
 the policy, and, if the constitutional means had existed, would, 
 admittedly, have defeated it, as they had defeated the Home 
 Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. The change of national opinion 
 has, I believe, been considerable ; but the circumstances 
 remain ominous for the dispassionate discussion of the Irish 
 Constitution. Patriotic people can only do their best to 
 ensure that the grant of Home Rule shall not be nullified by 
 restrictions and limitations which, if they are designed merely
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 191 
 
 to appease opposition, are destined to create friction and 
 discontent. 
 
 I am far from implying that restrictions are bad things in 
 themselves. All Constitutions, whether the sole work of the 
 men who are to live under them, like that of the United States, 
 or the gift of a Sovereign State to a dependency, or the joint 
 work of a Sovereign and a dependent State, contain restric- 
 tions designed for the common good. The criterion of their 
 value is the measure of consent they meet with from those 
 who have to live under and work the Constitution, and it is 
 that circumstance which makes it urgent that Irish opinion 
 should be evoked upon their future Constitution, and that the 
 Irish Nationalist party should think out its own scheme of 
 Home Rule. The Constitution of the United States contains 
 many self-imposed restrictions upon the powers both of the 
 Central and the State Governments, in the interest of 
 minorities ; and nobody accuses the Americans of having 
 insulted themselves. 
 
 It will be no slur on Ireland, for example, if the most 
 elaborate safeguards against the oppression of the Protestant 
 minority are inserted in the Bill, provided that Nationalist 
 Ireland, recognizing the fears of the minority, spontaneously 
 recommends, or, at any rate, freely consents to their insertion 
 a consent which could not, of course, be expected if their 
 tendency was to derange the functions of Government or 
 cripple the Legislature. 
 
 On the other hand, it would be a slur on Ireland which she 
 would justly resent, besides being a highly impolitic step, 
 to deny to the Irish Executive an important power, such, for 
 example, as the control of its own police. 
 
 B. 
 
 It is a grave difficulty that there is no public opinion in 
 Ireland as to the form of the Irish Constitution. That is 
 an almost inevitable result of political conditions past and 
 present. Violent intestinal antagonisms are not favourable 
 to constructive thought. The best men of a country, working 
 in harmony, are needed to devise a good Constitution, and if 
 any Irishman could succeed in convening a Conference like
 
 192 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 that which created the South African Union, he would be 
 famous and honoured for ever in the annals of the future 
 Ireland. That Conference, we must remember, was itself 
 the result of the grants of Home Rule two years previously, 
 and these grants in their turn were greatly facilitated by 
 the co-operation of Britons and Dutchmen.* Canada, in 1840, 
 is a warning of the errors made in constructing a Constitution 
 without such co-operation. Eventually it had to be torn up 
 and refashioned. The best way of avoiding any such error 
 in Ireland's case is to expel the spirit of distrust which animated 
 the framers of the Canadian Union Act of 1840. 
 
 C. 
 
 So much for the spirit in which we should approach the 
 problem, and I pass to the consideration of the problem itself. 
 What is to be the framework of Home Rule ? I take it for 
 granted that there must, in the broad sense, be responsible 
 government, that is to say, an Irish Legislature, with an 
 Irish Cabinet responsible to that Legislature, and, through the 
 Lord-Lieutenant, to the Crown. So much is common ground 
 with nearly all advocates of Home Rule, for I take it that there 
 is no question of reverting to anything in the nature of the 
 abortive Irish Council Bill of 1907.f But agreement upon 
 responsible government does not carry us far enough. What 
 are to be the relations between the subordinate Irish Parlia- 
 ment and Government, and the Imperial Parliament and 
 Government ? 
 
 We immediately feel the need of a scientific nomenclature. 
 In popular parlance, two possible types of Home Rule are 
 recognized " Federal " and " Colonial." Both, of course, 
 may be " Colonial," because there are Colonial Federations as 
 well as Colonial Unitary States. But, nomenclature apart, 
 the two possible types of Irish Home Rule correspond to two 
 
 * See p. 140. 
 
 f The Bill set up a Council of eighty-two elected and twenty-four 
 nominated members, with the Under-Secretary as an ex-officio member. So 
 far it resembled the abortive Transvaal Constitution of 1905 (see p. 130), but 
 the Irish Council was only to be given control of certain specified Departments, 
 and was financed by a fixed Imperial grant. It was to have no power of 
 legislation or taxation, and was under the complete control of the Lord- 
 Lieutenant.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 193 
 
 distinct types of subordinate Constitution. The " Colonial " 
 type is peculiar to the British Empire, the other is to be found 
 in many parts of the world the United States, for example, 
 and Germany, and Switzerland. 
 
 Let us examine these types a little more closely, confining 
 ourselves as far as possible to the British Empire, past and 
 present, because within it we can find nearly all the instruction 
 we need. As I showed in my sketch of the growth of Colonial 
 Home Rule, all the Colonies now classed as self-governing, 
 together with the American Colonies before their independence, 
 were originally unitary States, subordinate to the Crown, each 
 looking directly to Great Britain, possessing no constitutional 
 relation with one another, and gradually obtaining their indi- 
 vidual local autonomies under the name of " Responsible 
 Government." New Zealand and Newfoundland alone have 
 maintained their original individualities, and their Constitu- 
 tions, from an historical standpoint, are the best examples of 
 the first of the two types we are considering. Now for the 
 Federal type. Very early in the history of the American 
 Colonies (in 1643) the New England group formed amongst 
 themselves a loose confederation, which was not formally 
 recognized by the British Government, and which perished in 
 1684. In the next century the War of Independence produced 
 the confederation of all the thirteen Colonies, but this was 
 little more in effect than a very badly contrived alliance for 
 military purposes, and it was a keen sense of the inadequacy 
 of the bond that stimulated the construction of the Great 
 Constitution of 1787, the first Federal Union ever devised by 
 the English-speaking race. All the States combined to confer 
 certain defined powers upon a Federal Parliament, to which 
 each sent representatives, and upon a Federal Executive whose 
 head, the President, all shared in electing. At the same time, 
 each State preserved its own Constitution and the power to 
 amend it, with the one broad condition that it must be Re- 
 publican, and subject to any limitation upon its powers which 
 the Federal Constitution imposed. 
 
 Eighty years elapsed before any similar Federal Union was 
 formed by Colonies within the British Empire. As we have 
 seen, all the various North American Colonies which received 
 Constitutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and 
 
 13
 
 194 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 all the Australasian Colonies similarly honoured in thenineteenth 
 century, were placed in direct relation to the British Crown 
 and in isolation from one another. Upper Canada had no 
 political ties with Lower Canada, Nova Scotia none with New 
 Brunswick, Victoria none with Tasmania. Several abortive 
 schemes were proposed at one time or another for the Federa- 
 tion of the North American Colonies, but the first measure of 
 amalgamation, namely, the union of the two Canadas in 1840, 
 was a step in the wrong direction, and bore, as I have shown, 
 a marked resemblance, particularly in the motives which dic- 
 tated it, to the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a 
 compulsory Union, imposed by the Mother Country, and 
 founded on suspicion of the French. So far from being 
 Federal, it was a clumsy and unworkable Legislative Union 
 of the two Provinces, which lasted as long as it did only because 
 the principle of responsible government, established in 1847, 
 covered a multitude of sins. The somewhat similar attempt 
 in Australia in 1843 to amalgamate the two settlements of 
 Port Phillip, afterwards Victoria, and New South Wales, at a 
 time when each had evolved a distinct individuality of its own, 
 was defeated by the strenuous opposition of the Port Phillip 
 colonists, and revoked in 1850. 
 
 Meanwhile, all aspirations after Federation in the outlying 
 parts of the Empire were discouraged by the home authorities. 
 The most practical plan of all, Sir George Grey's great scheme 
 of South African Federation in 1859, was nipped in the bud. 
 Canada eventually led the way. The failure of the Canadian 
 Union brought about its dissolution in 1867 by the Provinces 
 concerned, under the sanction of Great Britain (an example 
 of really sensible " dismemberment "), and their voluntary 
 Federation as Ontario and Quebec, together with Nova Scotia 
 and New Brunswick, under the collective title of the Dominion 
 of Canada, and the subsequent inclusion in this Federation of 
 all the North American Provinces with the exception of New- 
 foundland. 
 
 Note, at the outset, that this Federation differed from that 
 of the United States in being founded on the recognition of 
 an organic relation with an external suzerain authority an 
 authority which the Americans had abjured in framing their 
 independent Republic. In the matter of constitutional rela-
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 195 
 
 tions with Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada now assumed, 
 in its collective capacity, the position formerly held by each 
 individual Province, and still held by Newfoundland. Direct 
 relations between the individual Provinces of the Federation 
 and the Mother Country practically ceased, and were replaced 
 by a Federal relation with the Dominion. Provincial Lieu- 
 tenant-Governors are appointed by the Dominion Government 
 acting in the name of the Governor-General, not directly by 
 the British Government,* and, although in constitutional 
 theory the Crown, as in every least fraction of the Empire, is 
 the sole and immediate source of executive authority, and an 
 indispensable agent in all legislation, not only in the Dominion, 
 but in the Provinces,! in actual practice the only organic con- 
 nection left between a Province and Great Britain is the right 
 of appeal directly to the King in Council, that is, to the 
 Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, without the inter- 
 vention of the Supreme Court of Canada. 
 
 So much for the external relations of the Dominion. In 
 respect to the domestic relations between the Provinces and 
 the Dominion, the Federal principle used in Canada is funda- 
 mentally the same as that which obtains in the United States 
 and in every true Federation in the world, whether Monarchical 
 or Republican, whether self-contained, like the United States, 
 Germany, and Switzerland, or linked, as in the British Empire, 
 to a supreme and sovereign Government centred in London. 
 Each Province, as in every genuine Federation, is an imperium 
 in imperio, possessing a Constitution of its own, and delegating 
 central powers to a Federal Government. The nature and 
 extent of the powers thus delegated or reserved, and the char- 
 acter of the Federal Constitution itself, vary widely in different 
 Federations, but we need not consider these differences in any 
 detail. Let us remark generally, however, that the powers of 
 
 * This arrangement, which is peculiar to the Canadian Federation, is 
 regarded by some authorities as a somewhat serious infraction of the Federal 
 principle, since it seems to imply executive control of the Province by the 
 central Government. The Governors of the States in the Australian Federa- 
 tion are appointed by the Home Government. 
 
 f The Judicial Committee has ruled " that the relation between the Crown 
 and the Provinces is the same as that between the Crown and Dominion in 
 respect of such powers, executive and legislative, as are vested in them 
 respectively " (Maritime Bank of Canada v. Receiver-General of New Bruns- 
 wick, 1892),
 
 196 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the Canadian Province are much smaller than those of the 
 American State, and that what lawyers call "the residuary 
 powers " that is, all powers not specifically allotted belong 
 to the Dominion, whereas in the United States and Switzerland 
 they belong to the State or Canton. 
 
 The Australian Commonwealth of 1900 came into being in 
 the same way as the Dominion of Canada, by the voluntary 
 act of the several Colonies concerned Victoria, New South 
 Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, Queens- 
 land under the sanction of the British Crown and Parliament. 
 New Zealand stood out, and remained, like Newfoundland, a 
 unitary State directly subordinate to Great Britain. Nor, in 
 the matter of relations with the Mother Country, were the 
 federating Colonies merged so completely in the Common- 
 wealth as the Provinces of Canada in the Dominion. The 
 Canadians had not only to construct the Dominion Constitu- 
 tion, but new Constitutions for two of the federating Provinces 
 Ontario and Quebec and it was natural, therefore, that they 
 should identify the Provinces more closely with the Dominion. 
 The Australians, having to deal with six ready-made State 
 Constitutions, left them as they were, subject only to the 
 limitations imposed by the Commonwealth Constitution. 
 One of the results is that the State Governors are still appointed 
 directly by the British Government, not by the Common- 
 wealth. This constitutional arrangement, however, has no 
 very practical significance. The right of appeal direct from 
 a State Court to the King in Council, without the intervention 
 of the High Court of Australia, remains, as in Canada, the only 
 direct link between the individual States and the British 
 Government. 
 
 The Federal tie between the States and the Commonwealth, 
 as defined in the Act of 1900, is looser than that between the 
 Provinces of Canada and the Dominion, and bears more 
 resemblance to the relation between a State and the Federal 
 Government of the United States. As in that country and in 
 Switzerland, residuary powers rest with the State or Canton 
 Governments, not with the Federal Government. 
 
 The South African Union of 1909, comprising the Colonies 
 of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, the Transvaal, and the 
 Orange River Colony, had a Federal origin, so to speak, in
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 197 
 
 that the old Colonies agreed to abandon a great part of their 
 autonomies to a central Government and Legislature ; but the 
 spirit of unity carried them so far as almost to annul State 
 rights. The powers now retained by the provincial Legisla- 
 tures are so small, and the control of the Union Government 
 is so far-reaching, that the whole system is rightly described 
 as a Union, not as a Federation. The Provinces, which are 
 really little more than municipalities, have no longer any 
 relation except in remotest constitutional theory with the 
 Mother Country, their Administrators are appointed by the 
 Union, and, unlike the Provinces of Canada and the States of 
 Australia, they have not even an internal system of responsible 
 government.* No direct appeal lies to the King in Council 
 from the provincial Courts, which are now, in fact, only 
 " divisions " of the Supreme Court of South Africa. The 
 Provinces, in short, do not possess " Constitutions " at all. 
 Their powers can be extinguished without their individual 
 assent by an Act of the Union Parliament, whereas the Canadian 
 Dominion has no power to amend either the Dominion or the 
 Provincial Constitutions, and in Australia constitutional 
 amendments must be agreed to by the States separately as 
 well as by the Commonwealth Parliament. But these revolu- 
 tionary changes in the status of the old South African Colonies 
 were brought about, let us remember, by the free consent of 
 the inhabitants of South Africa, after prolonged deliberation. 
 
 The United States, the Australian Commonwealth, and the 
 Canadian Dominion are, then, the three genuine Federations 
 which the English-speaking races have constructed. The two 
 last are included in the present British Empire, and they stand 
 side by side with the three unitary Colonies South Africa, 
 New Zealand, and Newfoundland. The constitutional rela- 
 tion of each of these five bodies to the Mother Country is 
 precisely the same, although they differ widely in internal 
 structure, as in wealth and population. Within each of the 
 two Federations, as we have seen, there exists a nexus of minor 
 Constitutions, State or Provincial, which have virtually no 
 relations with the Mother Country, but are integral parts of 
 the major Federation. 
 
 * They are governed by Executive Committees, the members of which 
 need not be members of the Councils.
 
 198 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 II. 
 FEDERAL OR COLONIAL HOME RULE ? 
 
 We are now in a position to pose our main question, and the 
 simplest course is to pose it in an illustrative form. Broadly 
 speaking, is the relation between Ireland and Great Britain to 
 resemble that between the Province of Quebec and the Dominion 
 of Canada, or that between the Dominion of Canada and the 
 United Kingdom ? One might equally well contrast the rela- 
 tion of Victoria to the Australian Commonwealth with the 
 relation of New Zealand or Newfoundland to the United 
 Kingdom. I choose the Canadian illustration because it is 
 more compact and striking, and because it corresponds more 
 closely to the history and to the realities of the case. More- 
 over, Quebec, although she had a no more stormy domestic 
 history, owing to lack of Home Rule, than Ontario, is bi-racial, 
 and on that account underwent in 1840 compulsory amalgama- 
 tion with her wholly British neighbour, just as Ireland, originally 
 bi-racial, was forcibly amalgamated with Great Britain in 1800. 
 The Canadian partners agreeel to break this bonel, to fashion a 
 better one on the Federal principle, in the manner vaguely 
 adumbrated by advocates of the " Federal " principle for Irish 
 Home Rule, and, as regards their relations with the Mother 
 Country, to pool their interests and accept representation by 
 the Dominion alone. 
 
 Quebec Home Rule or Dominion Home Rule ? Needless to 
 say, these are only broad types chosen expressly to illustrate 
 two possible types of relation between Ireland and Great 
 Britain, which I shall henceforth refer to as " Federal " and 
 " Colonial." There is no reason why we should not profit in 
 other respects by both examples, nor is there any possibility 
 of copying either faithfully. 
 
 Both types fulfil the fundamental condition laid down at the 
 beginning of our discussion both, that is to say, are consistent 
 with responsible government in Ireland. Quebec, in its inner 
 working, is a microcosm of the Dominion, and the Dominion 
 system of responsible government is almost an exact copy of 
 the unwritten British Constitution. In Quebec (as in all the 
 Provinces and States of Canada and Australia) there is a
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 199 
 
 Cabinet, headed by a Prime Minister, composed of Members 
 of the Legislature, and responsible at once to that Legislature 
 and to the Lieutenant-Go vernor as representing the Crown. 
 Ireland, under a similar system (and, a fortiori, if she were put 
 in the position of the Dominion), would have a Cabinet re- 
 sponsible at once to the Irish Legislature and to the Lord- 
 Lieutenant representing the Crown. The parallel is more 
 apposite in the case of the Province of Quebec than in the 
 case of an Australian State, because, as I noted above, the 
 provincial Lieutenant-Governor is actually appointed by the 
 Dominion Government, and is in his turn responsible in the 
 first instance to that Government, just as the Irish Governor, 
 or Lord-Lieutenant, who, under Home Rule, will for the first 
 time justify his existence, is, and will still be, appointed by 
 the British Government. 
 
 But with the possibility of responsible government granted, 
 it must be confessed that the arguments against " Quebec 
 Home Rule " as a measure of practical politics at the present 
 moment, are insuperable. In the first place there is no ques- 
 tion in the coming Bill of federalizing the United Kingdom 
 on the lines of the Dominion of Canada 'that is, of construct- 
 ing a new Federal Parliament elected by the whole realm, 
 together with new local Legislatures elected by the various 
 fractions of the realm. Scottish and Welsh Home Rule are 
 in the air, but they are not practical issues. English Home 
 Rule is not even in the air. I mean that Englishmen, what- 
 ever their views on the congestion of Parliamentary business 
 owing to the pressure of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish affairs, 
 have not seriously considered the idea of a subordinate Legis- 
 lature exclusively English, which would be just as essential a 
 feature of a completely federalized kingdom as subordinate 
 Legislatures exclusively Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. 
 
 Not that it is essential to the federalization of the United 
 Kingdom that Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, should 
 all have separate Legislature. Any one of these fractions could 
 coalesce with another or others in a joint Legislature. It 
 would be technically possible, though highly unreasonable, to 
 go to the extreme of giving Great Britain, regarded as one 
 Province, a separate Legislature ; Ireland, regarded as another 
 Province, a separate Legislature ; and, above these two sub-
 
 200 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 ordinate bodies, a now Imperial Parliament representing the 
 whole realm. Such a dual Federation was nearly coming 
 about in Canada, when Ontario and Quebec dissolved their 
 Union and resolved to federate. It became a quadruple 
 Federation, owing to the adhesion of Nova Scotia and New 
 Brunswick ; but in a dual form it would have worked just as 
 well. It is scarcely necessary to say that the disparity in 
 population, resources, and power between Ireland and Great 
 Britain render a dual Federation, which, of course, involves 
 three Legislatures, chimerical. What I want to insist on is 
 that, whatever subdivisions are adopted, it is absolutely 
 essential to every Federation that there should be a division 
 of powers between a central and at least two local Legislatures 
 three altogether. That is the minimum. Other things are 
 also essential, but for the moment we can confine ourselves to 
 the outstanding requirement. Now, there is no question in 
 the coming Bill of any such Federation. Later years may see 
 such a development, whether from pressure of work on the 
 Imperial Parliament or from irresistible demand for Home 
 Rule from Scotland or Wales, or both, but not next year. The 
 Bill will contemplate two Parliaments, not three, namely, the 
 existing Imperial Parliament and the Irish Legislature. There 
 is, therefore, no question of Federal Home Rule, and the term 
 " Federal," as applied to Irish Home Rule at the present time, 
 is meaningless. 
 
 Nor can the coming Bill for Ireland make any preparation, 
 technically, for a general Federation. Morally, as I shall show, 
 it might have an important effect in stimulating local senti- 
 ment, not only in England, Scotland, and Wales, but in Ire- 
 land, towards a general Federation in the future, but in its 
 mechanical structure it must be not merely non-Federal, but 
 anti-Federal. One often hears it carelessly propounded that 
 Irish Home Rule, so devised as to be applicable in later years, 
 if they so desire, to Scotland, Wales, and England, will give us 
 by smooth mechanical means a General Federation. This is a 
 fallacy. At one stage or another, the earliest or the latest, 
 we should have to create a totally new central Parliament, 
 still elected by the whole people, but exclusively devoted to 
 Imperial affairs, and wholly exempt from local business, before 
 we possessed anything in the nature of a Federation. But,
 
 THE FKAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 201 
 
 whatever the future has in store, it would be a scandal if Irish 
 'Home Rule were to be hampered or delayed by the existence 
 of Scotch or Welsh claims, and it is earnestly to be hoped that 
 no action of that kind will be taken. The case of Ireland is 
 centuries old, and more urgent than ever. It differs radically 
 from any case that can possibly be made for Scotland and 
 Wales. 
 
 The Bill, I repeat, must be anti-Federal, centrifugal. In the 
 case of Ireland we have first to dissolve an unnatural union, 
 and then to revive an old right to autonomy, before we can 
 reach a healthy Federal Union. Such, exactly, was the history 
 of Canada. If, in that case, the dissolution of the Legislative 
 Union and the construction of the Federal Union were con- 
 summated simultaneously in the British North America Act 
 of 1867, they were nevertheless two distinct phases, and of 
 these two phases the first, implying the revival of the old 
 separate autonomies, was the indispensable precursor of 
 Federal Union. This antecedent recognition of autonomy was 
 not peculiar to Canada. Every Federation in the world arose 
 in the same way, by the voluntary act of States under one 
 Crown or suzerainty, but independent of one another, and 
 it is of the essence of Federalism that this psychological con- 
 dition should exist. Compulsory Federation would not last a 
 year. It would indeed be practicable to federalize the United 
 Kingdom by one Legislative Act, but the prior right to and 
 fitness for complete Home Rule on the part of each of the 
 component parts would have to be implicitly recognized. 
 
 It needs only a moment's consideration of Anglo-Irish 
 history to see the special applicability of the psychological 
 rule to Ireland. The evils of the Canadian Union, during the 
 twenty-seven years of its duration, are infinitesimal beside the 
 mischief, moral and material, which have been caused to both 
 partners by the forcible amalgamation of Great Britain and 
 Ireland ; the waste of indigenous talent, industrial and political ; 
 the dispersion all over the globe of Irishmen ; the conversion 
 of friends into enemies, of peaceable citizens into plotters of 
 treason, of farmers into criminals, of poets and statesmen into 
 gaolbirds ; the check to the production of wealth and Anglo- 
 Irish commerce ; the dislocation and demoralization of 
 Parliamentary life ; and, saddest results of all, the reac-
 
 202 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 tionary effect upon British statesmanship, domestic and Im- 
 perial, and the deterioration of Irish character within Ireland. 
 The voluntary principle at any rate, among the English- 
 speaking races is as essential to a true Union, like that of 
 the South African Colonies or that of Scotland and England, 
 as to a Federation. It is a sheer impossibility to create a 
 perfect, mechanical Union on a basis of hatred and coercion ; 
 witness the strangely anomalous colonial features surviving in 
 Irish Government the Lord-Lieutenancy, the separate ad- 
 ministration, and the standing army of police. 
 
 Persons inclined to reckon the advantages, whether of 
 Federation or of Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may 
 regard the psychological requirement as fanciful. It is not 
 fanciful ; on the contrary, it is related in the clearest way to 
 the concrete facts of the situation. Before there is any ques- 
 tion of Federation Ireland needs to find herself, to test her 
 own potentialities, to prove independence of character, thought, 
 and action, and to discover what she can do by her own 
 unaided will with her own resources. As I endeavoured to 
 show in the last chapter, these are the true reasons for Home 
 Rule. 
 
 Home Rule is neither a luxury nor a plaything, but a tre- 
 mendously exacting duty which must be undertaken by every 
 country conscious of repression and valuing its self-respect, 
 and which Ireland is praying to be allowed to undertake. 
 When a people has learnt to understand the extent of its own 
 powers and limitations, then it can safely and honourably 
 co-operate on a Federal basis with other peoples, and, in the 
 interests of efficiency and economy, can delegate to a central 
 Government, partly of its own choice, functions hitherto 
 locally exercised. Once more, that is the origin of all true 
 Federations, British and foreign, in all parts of the world. 
 
 If, then, the Home Rule Bill cannot in legal form be a 
 federating or unifying measure, it must be one of a precisely 
 opposite character, and a measure of devolution. It is a proof 
 of the need for a scientific nomenclature that the word " devo- 
 lution " has to Irish ears come to mean something similar in 
 kind to " Federal " Home Rule, but less in degree, and 
 something different in kind from " Colonial " Home Rule, 
 and infinitely less in degree. What a tangle of truth and
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 203 
 
 fallacy from the misuse of a single word ! It is associated 
 rightly with the ill-starred Irish Council Bill of 1907, and it 
 has been universally but wrongly used to indicate a small 
 measure of local government in contradistinction to the Home 
 Rule Bills of Mr. Gladstone and, a fortiori, to any more liberal 
 schemes. 
 
 Nevertheless, the problem before us is one of devolution 
 pure and simple, and the question is. how far is devolution to 
 go ? It may go to the full length of Colonial Home Rule, 
 that is, Ireland may be vested with the full freedom now en- 
 joyed by a self-governing Colony (for the grants of Colonial 
 Home Rule were measures of devolution), or it might at the 
 other extreme take the form of a petty municipal government. 
 By hypothesis, however, we are precluded from considering 
 any scheme which does not admit of responsible government 
 in Ireland. That condition commits us to something in the 
 nature of " Colonial " Home Rule, now enjoyed by States 
 widely varying in size, wealth, and population, from the 
 Dominion of Canada, with over seven million inhabitants, to 
 Newfoundland, with under a quarter of a million inhabitants 
 and very slender resources. It is worth notice also (to shift 
 our analogy for the moment) that little Newfoundland, which, 
 owing to divergency of interest, has declined both federation 
 with the Dominion and union with any of the constituent parts 
 of the Dominion, subsists happily and peacefully by the side 
 of her powerful neighbour ; and that New Zealand, for the 
 same reason, prefers to occupy the same independent position 
 by the side of Australia. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE EXCLUSION OK RETENTION OF IRISH MEMBERS AT 
 WESTMINSTER.* 
 
 We have discarded the " Federal " solution as wholly im- 
 practicable, and have arrived at the " Colonial " solution. 
 And at this point I feel it necessary to plead for the reader's 
 patient, if reluctant, attention to what follows. The solution 
 I suggest is unpopular, mainly, I believe, because prejudice 
 has so beclouded the issue in the past, and because for the 
 
 * In writing upon this subject, I am indebted to an able paper by Mr. 
 Basil Williams, which is to be found in "Home Rule Problems."
 
 204 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 eighteen years since the last Home Rule Bill, while prejudice 
 has diminished, the subject of Irish Home Rule has ceased to 
 be studied with scientific care. 
 
 Where is the crux of the problem ? In what provision of 
 the coming Bill will the difference between Federal Home Rule 
 and Colonial Homo Rule arise ? The answer is clear : in the 
 retention or exclusion of Irish Members at Westminster. No 
 Colony has representatives at Westminster. The Federal 
 solution, on the other hand, whether it be applied to the whole 
 Empire or to the United Kingdom alone, involves an exclu- 
 sively Federal Parliament unconcerned with State or provincial 
 affairs. That we have not got. What we have got is an abso- 
 lutely supreme and sovereign Parliament which has legal 
 authority, not only over all Imperial affairs within and with- 
 out the United Kingdom, but over the minutest local affairs. 
 Unrepresented though the Colonies are, they can legally be 
 taxed, coerced, enslaved at any moment by an Act passed 
 by a party majority in this Parliament. Such measures, 
 though legal, would be unconstitutional ; but, both by law 
 and custom, and in actual daily practice, Parliament passes 
 and enforces certain Acts affecting the self-governing Colonies, 
 and wields potential and actual authority of all-embracing 
 extent over the Empire and over the local affairs of the United 
 Kingdom. 
 
 When we set up an Irish Legislature, then, we have to con- 
 template four different classes of affairs in a descending scale : 
 (1) Affairs of common interest to the whole Empire ; (2) affairs 
 of exclusive interest to the United Kingdom ; (3) affairs ex- 
 clusively British ; (4) affairs exclusively Irish. 
 
 With regard to (1), the prospects of Imperial Federation do 
 not affect the Irish issue. It is no doubt illogical and some- 
 times highly inconvenient that the British Cabinet and Parlia- 
 ment, representing British and Irish electors only, should 
 decide matters which deeply concern the whole Empire, 
 including the self-governing Colonies, but it is the fact. In 
 the meantime we are securing very effective consultation with 
 the self-governing Colonies by the method of Imperial Con- 
 ference. A Federal Parliament for the whole Empire is a 
 possible though a remote alternative to that system. Colonial 
 representation in the present Imperial Parliament is an alto-
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 205 
 
 gether impracticable alternative. The suggestion had often 
 been made for the American Colonies at the height of their 
 discontent, later for Canada as an alternative to the Act of 
 1791, and in recent times also. The same fallacious idea 
 underlay the Union of Ireland with Great Britain and her 
 representation in Parliament, while retaining colonial institu- 
 tions. At present the prospects of Imperial Federation seem 
 to be indifferent. On the other hand, the affection between 
 all branches of our race which is the indispensable groundwork 
 of Federation becomes visibly stronger, and will become 
 stronger, provided that we do not revert to the ancient and 
 discredited policy either of dictating to the Colonies or taking 
 sides with one or another of the parties within them, provided 
 also that the Colonies in their growing strength do not dictate 
 to us or take sides with one or other of our parties. 
 
 But, whatever the prospects of Imperial Federation, so long 
 as the present situation lasts, there is no reason for giving a 
 self-governing Ireland more control over Imperial matters 
 affecting the self-governing Colonies than the self-governing 
 Colonies themselves possess. The present position is illogical 
 enough ; that would be to render it doubly illogical. Repre- 
 sentation of Ireland, therefore, at Westminster, on the ground 
 that she should take part in settling matters of the widest 
 Imperial purport, is indefensible. The alternative and much 
 more effectual method, as with the Colonies, is Conference. 
 
 (2-4) But it is when we come to regard the United Kingdom 
 as a self-contained entity that the difficulty of retaining Irish 
 Members at Westminster appears most formidable. If we 
 discard the Federal solution we must discard it wholeheartedly, 
 not from a pedantic love of logic, but to avoid real, practical 
 anomalies which might cause the whole political machine to 
 work even worse than it does at present. From what I have 
 written, it will be seen at once that to retain the Irish Members 
 in the House of Commons, while giving Ireland responsible 
 government, would be to set up a kind of hybrid system, 
 retaining the disadvantages of the Union without gaining the 
 advantages of Federalism. A Federal system needs a Federal 
 Parliament, which we have not got, and shall not get for a 
 long time yet. To introduce into it a quasi-Federal element 
 is to mix oil with water.
 
 206 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 I state the proposition in this broad way at first in order 
 to push home the truth that Irish representation at West- 
 minster will involve anomalies and dangers which, beyond a 
 certain very limited point, cannot be mitigated. Methods of 
 mitigation I will deal with in a moment. Let me remark first 
 upon the strange history of this question of Irish representa- 
 tion at Westminster. Obviously it is the most fundamental 
 question of all in the matter of Home Rule. The whole 
 structure of the Bill hangs on it It affects every provision, 
 and particularly the financial provisions. Yet Mr. Gladstone 
 went no farther than to call it an " organic detail," and in 
 popular controversy it is still generally regarded in that light, 
 or even in a less serious light. As a matter of history, how- 
 ever, it has proved to be a factor of importance in deciding the 
 fate of the Home Rule Bills. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone, in pro- 
 posing to exclude Irish Members altogether, roused a storm of 
 purely sentimental opposition. In 1893, in proposing to re- 
 tain them first with limited functions, then on the old terms of 
 complete equality with British Members he met with opposi- 
 tion even more formidable, because it was not merely senti- 
 mental, but unanswerably practical. On both occasions Mr. 
 Chamberlain took a prominent part in the opposition : in 
 1886 because he was then a Federalist, advocating " Quebec " 
 Home Rule for Ireland, and regarding the exclusion of Irish 
 Members from Westminster as contravening the Federal 
 principle ; in 1893 because, having ceased to be a Home Ruler, 
 he had no difficulty in showing that the retention of Irish 
 Members, either with full or limited functions, was neither 
 Federation nor Union, but an unworkable mixture of the two. 
 
 These facts should be a warning to those who trifle thought- 
 lessly with what they call "Federal" Home Rule. It was 
 through a desperate desire to conciliate that Mr. Gladstone 
 caught at the Federal chimera in 1893, and produced a scheme 
 which he himself could not defend. And it was one of the 
 very statesmen that he sought to conciliate a statesman, 
 moreover, possessing one of the keenest and strongest intel- 
 lects of the time who snatched at the chimera in 1886, 
 and argued it out of existence in 1893. We Home Rulers do 
 not want a repetition of those events. We want Home Rule, 
 and if we are to be defeated, let us be defeated on a simple
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 207 
 
 straightforward issue, not on an indefensible complication of 
 our own devising. 
 
 Now to details. There are five ways of dealing with the 
 question, and of these I will take first the four different ways 
 of including Irish Members in the House of Commons, leaving 
 their total exclusion to the last. 
 
 1. Inclusion of Irish Members in their full numbers for all 
 purposes that is, with a right to vote upon all questions 
 British, Irish, and Imperial. [By "full numbers " I mean, not 
 the existing figure of 103, but numbers fully, and no more 
 than fully, warrantable according to the latest figures of 
 population say 70.] 
 
 2. Inclusion in full numbers for limited purposes. 
 
 3. Inclusion in reduced numbers for all purposes. [By 
 " reduced numbers " I mean in numbers less than population 
 would warrant.] 
 
 4. Inclusion in reduced numbers for limited purposes. 
 Now (4) I only set out for symmetry. It has never been 
 
 proposed by anybody, and hardly needs notice. 
 
 The three others are alike in two respects that they leave 
 untouched the question of representation in the House of Lords, 
 and that they directly infringe both the Federal principle and 
 the Union principle by giving representation, both in a unitary 
 and a subordinate Legislature, to one portion of the realm. 
 
 Let us look at No. 1 inclusion in full numbers for all pur- 
 poses. This was Mr. Gladstone's revised proposal of 1893, 
 and it formed part of the Bill thrown out by the Lords. The 
 number of Irish Members was to have been 80. But reduc- 
 tion, as Mr. Gladstone admitted, would scarcely affect the 
 inherent difficulties of inclusion. Nor must it be forgotten 
 that reduction from 103 to 70 can be justified only by the 
 concession of a large measure of Home Rule. It is one of 
 the paradoxes of an unnatural Union that, over-represented 
 as Ireland is, she has not now power enough to secure her own 
 will. To reduce her numbers, while retaining large powers 
 over Irish affairs at Westminster, would be unjust. For the 
 time being I shall defer the consideration of those powers, and 
 argue the matter on broad principle, assuming that the powers 
 retained in Imperial hands are small enough to warrant a 
 reduction from 103 to 70.
 
 208 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Now let us apply our touchstone to this question of inclusion 
 in " full " numbers. Will it be good for Ireland ? Surely not. 
 
 (a) It will be bad for Ireland, in the first place, to have her 
 energies weakened at the outset by having to find two com- 
 plete sets of representatives, when she will be in urgent need 
 of all her best men to do her own work. There is no analogy 
 with Quebec, Victoria, Massachusetts, or Wiirtemburg, which 
 had all been accustomed to self-government before they 
 entered their respective Federations. Ireland has to find her 
 best men, create her domestic policies, reconstruct her adminis- 
 tration, and the larger the reservoir of talent she has to draw 
 from the better. When true Federation becomes practical 
 politics it will be another matter. By that time she will have 
 men to spare. 
 
 (6) More serious objection still, retention in full numbers 
 will, it is to be feared, tend to counteract the benefits of Home 
 Rule in Ireland by keeping alive old dissensions and bad political 
 habits. If, after long and hot controversy, a system is set up 
 under which Great Britain can still be regarded as a pacificator 
 half umpire and half policeman of what Peel called the 
 " warring sects " of Ireland, it is to be feared that the Members 
 sent to London may fall into the old unnatural party divisions ; 
 a Protestant minority seeking to revoke or curtail Home Rule, 
 and a Nationalist majority paradoxical survival of a pre 
 national period seeking to maintain or enlarge Home Rule. 
 These unhappy results would react in their turn upon the 
 Irish Legislature, impairing the value of Home Rule, and 
 making Ireland, as of old, the cockpit of sectarian and senti- 
 mental politics. The same results would have happened if, 
 simultaneously with the concession of Home Rule to Canada, 
 Australia and South Africa, these Colonies had been given 
 representation in the British Parliament. 
 
 (c) Whatever the extent of the danger I have indicated, 
 inclusion in full numbers will tend to keep alive the habit 
 of dependence on Great Britain for financial aid, a habit so 
 ingrained, through no fault of Ireland's, that it will be difficult 
 to break if the Parliamentary leverage is left intact. If ever 
 there was a country which needed, as far as humanly possible, 
 to be thrown for a time not necessarily for a long time 
 upon its own resources, it is Ireland. Every other self-
 
 THE FRAM WORK OF HOME RULE 209 
 
 governing Colony in the Empire has gone through that bracing 
 and purifying ordeal, accepting from the Mother Country, 
 without repayment, only the loan of military and naval defence, 
 and Ireland can imitate them without dishonour. 
 
 What is bad for Ireland is sure to be bad for Great Britain, 
 too, and the bad effect in this case is sufficiently apparent. 
 Imagine the result if Quebec, besides having her own Legisla- 
 ture and her own representatives in the Dominion Parliament, 
 were to be represented also in the Ontario Legislature. Ireland, 
 besides controlling her own affairs, free from British inter- 
 ference, would have a voice in British affairs, and sometimes 
 a deciding voice. " If you keep the Irish in," said Mr. John 
 Morley in 1886 and he meant in their full numbers " they 
 will be what they have ever been in the past the arbitrators 
 and masters of English policy, of English legislative business, 
 and of the rise and fall of British administrations." That is 
 a rather exaggerated account of the past, for had it been 
 literally true Ireland would have had Home Rule long ago ; 
 and it was unduly pessimistic about the future, for it hardly 
 made sufficient allowance for a change in Irish spirit as a 
 result of Home Rule ; but there is a truth in the words which 
 everybody recognizes and whose recognition is one of the 
 great motive forces behind Home Rule. Even a total change 
 in Irish sentiments and parties would not remove the danger, 
 and might intensify it by producing at Westminster a solid 
 instead of, as at present, a divided, Irish vote. It would be 
 truer, perhaps, to say what I said above, that retention of 
 Members would tend to stereotype Irish parties and the mutual 
 antipathy of Ireland and Great Britain. 
 
 2. Inclusion hi full numbers (say 70) for limited purposes. 
 This (with the figure of 80) was Mr. Gladstone's original 
 proposal of 1893, and it took the form of a clause known as 
 the " In and Out Clause," which purported to divide all 
 Parliamentary business into Imperial, Irish, and non-Irish 
 business, and to give Irish Members the right to vote only 
 on Imperial and Irish subjects. Mr. Gladstone never dis- 
 guised his view that a sound classification was impracticable, 
 and put forward the clause, frankly, as a tentative scheme 
 for the discussion of the House. Like its successor, the 
 " Omnes omnia " Clause, it was riddled with criticism, and it 
 
 14
 
 210 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 was eventually withdrawn. Without investigating details, 
 the reader will perceive at once the hopeless confusion arising 
 from an attempt to inject a tincture of Federalism into a 
 unitary Parliament, forming part of an unwritten Constitution 
 of great age and infinite delicacy. It is not merely that it 
 is absolutely impossible to distinguish rigidly between Im- 
 perial, Irish, and British business. The great objection is 
 that there would be two alternating majorities in an Assembly 
 which is, and must be, absolutely governed by a party majority, 
 and which, through that majority, controls the Executive. 
 It " passed the wit of man," said Mr. Gladstone, to separate 
 in practice the Legislative and Executive functions in the 
 British Constitution. At present a hostile vote in the House 
 of Commons overturns the Ministry of the day and changes 
 the whole British and Imperial administration. A hostile 
 vote, therefore, determined by the Irish Members, on a question 
 affecting Ireland, such as the application to Ireland of a 
 British Bill, would seriously embarrass the Ministry, if it did 
 not overturn it. The log-rolling and illicit pressure which 
 this state of things would encourage may be easily imagined. 
 A Ministry might find itself after a General Election in the 
 position of having a majority for some purposes and not for 
 others. That was actually the case in 1893, when Mr. Glad- 
 stone, with a majority, including the Irish Nationalists, of only 
 40, was carrying his Bill through Parliament. It is actually 
 the case now, in the sense that if the Irish Nationalists 
 voted with the Opposition, the Ministry would be defeated. 
 Any change for the better in Irish sentiment towards Great 
 Britain would pro tanto mitigate the difficulty, but would not 
 remove it, and might, as I suggested above, increase it, by 
 the creation of a solid Irish vote. If Great Britain resents the 
 present system, she alone is to blame. As long as she insists 
 on keeping the Irish Members out of Ireland, where they ought 
 to be, she thoroughly deserves their tyranny, and would be wise 
 to get rid of it by the means they suggest. Until they are given 
 Home Rule, they are not only justified in using their power, 
 but are bound, in duty and honour, to use it. To reproduce 
 in the Home Rule Bill, albeit in a modified form, conditions 
 which might lead to the same results as before would surely 
 be a gratuitous act of unwisdom.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 211 
 
 3. Inclusion in reduced numbers for all purposes. By 
 " reduced numbers " is meant numbers less than the popula- 
 tion of Ireland warrants. For the sake of argument we may 
 assume the number to be 35, that is, approximately half the 
 proper proportion ; but directly we desert a scientific prin- 
 ciple of allocation, the exact figure we adopt is a matter of 
 arbitrary choice. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone appears to have contemplated this plan for 
 a brief period in 1889 ; but he dropped it. Clearly it cannot 
 be defended on any logical grounds, but only as a compromise 
 designed, as it avowedly was, to conciliate British opinion. 
 It would minimize but not remove the difficulties inherent in 
 No. 1 ; and so far as it did lessen these difficulties, the repre- 
 sentation given would be impotent and superfluous. That is 
 why I have taken it last in order of the three possible methods 
 of inclusion. It raises in the sharpest and clearest form the 
 important question underlying the whole of the discussion 
 we have just been through namely, what are to be the 
 powers delegated to the Irish Parliament and Executive, and 
 what are to be the powers reserved to the Imperial Parliament 
 and Executive ? 
 
 If the powers reserved are small, it will be possible to justify 
 not merely a small Irish representation in the House of 
 Commons, but even under certain conditions the total ex- 
 clusion of Irish members. Indeed, if the figure 35 corresponded 
 to the facts of the case, one might as well abandon these 
 painful efforts to " conciliate British opinion," accept total 
 exclusion, and substitute Conference for representation. If 
 the powers reserved are large, full representation in spite of 
 all the crushing objections to it, will be absolutely necessary, in 
 order to safeguard Irish interests. Here is the grand dilemma, 
 and it says little for our common sense as a nation that we 
 should submit to be puzzled and worried by it any longer. 
 Half the worry arises from the old and infinitely pernicious 
 habit of regarding Ireland as outside the pale of political 
 science, of ignoring in her case what Lord Morley has called 
 the " fundamental probabilities of civil society." Let us 
 break this habit once and for all and take the logical and politic 
 course of total exclusion, with its logical and politic accompani- 
 ment, a measure of Home Rule wide enough to justify the
 
 212 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 absence of Irish representation at Westminster. That will be 
 found to be the path both of duty and of safety. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood that lapse of tune has not 
 diminished appreciably the power of the arguments against the 
 inclusion of Irish Members in the House of Commons. On 
 their merits, these arguments are still unanswerable, and we had 
 better recognize the fact. Mr. Balfour said, in 1893, " Those 
 questions " (of representation at Westminster) " are not 
 capable of solution, and the very fact that they are incapable 
 of solution affords, in our opinion, a conclusive argument 
 against the whole scheme, of which one or other of the plans 
 in question must form a part." Speaking as a Unionist, 
 Mr. Balfour was right, and, as Home Rulers, we should be 
 wise to remember it. 
 
 Lastly, even if the question of inclusion in the House of 
 Commons were " capable of solution," as it is not, there would 
 remain the problem raised by the House of Lords. It is idle 
 to ignore the fact that the bulk of the Irish peerage, and the 
 Assembly of which it forms part, has been for a century in 
 consistent and resolute opposition to the views of the vast 
 majority of Irishmen. The recent curtailment of its powers, 
 whether a right or a wrong measure in itself, does not make 
 it any the more suitable as an Upper Chamber, under a Home 
 Rule scheme, for the decision of important Irish questions 
 reserved for settlement at Westminster ; indeed, the bare 
 proposal is the best imaginable example of the extraordinary 
 complications which would ensue from the introduction of a 
 quasi-Federal element into a unitary Constitution. 
 
 Federal Upper Chambers, so far from being hostile to 
 State rights, are almost invariably framed on the principle of 
 giving disproportionately large representation to the smaller 
 States. In the United States and Australia, for example, 
 every State, however small, has an equal number of Senators. 
 
 It will be clear now that there are two distinct ways of 
 approaching the question of the framework of Home Rule. 
 One may begin with the nature and extent of the powers 
 reserved or delegated, and proceed from them to the inclusion 
 and exclusion of Irish representation at Westminster, or one 
 may begin with the topic of inclusion or exclusion and proceed 
 from it to the nature and extent of powers. While premising
 
 THE FBAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 213 
 
 that we must trust Ireland and evoke her sense of responsi- 
 bility, I chose the latter of the two courses, because I believe it 
 to be on the whole the most illuminating and trustworthy 
 course. It is also the more logical course, though I should not 
 have adopted it for that reason alone ; and I have already 
 given, I hope, some good reasons to show that in this matter 
 logic and policy coincide. Englishmen pride themselves on 
 the lack of logic which characterizes their slowly evolved 
 institutions, but they may easily carry that pride to pre- 
 posterous extremes. Faced now with the necessity of making 
 a written Constitution which will stand the test of daily use 
 they would commit the last of innumerable errors in Irish 
 policy if, with full warning from experience elsewhere, they 
 were to frame a measure whose unprecedented and unworkable 
 provisions were the outcome of a distrust of Ireland which it 
 was the ostensible object of the measure itself to remove. 
 
 IV. 
 IRISH POWERS AND THEIR BEARING ON EXCLUSION. 
 
 I pass to what I suggest to be the right solution : Total 
 exclusion, as proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1886, though he 
 shrank from recommending what he knew to be its financial 
 corollary. Mr. Bright regarded exclusion as the " best clause " 
 of a dangerous scheme, and Mr. Chamberlain has admitted that 
 he attacked it, as he attacked the proposals for Land Purchase, 
 which he knew to be right, in order to " kill the Bill."* I pro- 
 pose only to recapitulate the merits of exclusion before dealing 
 with the alleged difficulties of that form of Home Rule, and in 
 particular with the point on which the controversy mainly 
 turns Finance . 
 
 To give Ireland Colonial Home Rule, without representation 
 in London, is to follow the natural channel of historical develop- 
 ment. Ireland was virtually a Colony, and is treated still in 
 many respects as an inferior type of Colony, in other respects 
 as a partner in a vicious type of Union. We cannot improve 
 the Union, and it is, admittedly, a failure. Let us, then, in 
 
 * "Life of Parnell," R. Barry O'Brien, pp. 149 and 139-141.
 
 214 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 broad outline, model her political system on that of a self- 
 go verning Colony. 
 
 History apart, circumstances demand this solution. It 
 is the best solution for Ireland, because she needs, precisely 
 what the Colonies needed full play for her native faculties, 
 full responsibility for the adjustment of her internal dissen- 
 sions, for the exploitation, unaided, of her own resources, 
 and for the settlement of neglected problems peculiar to herself. 
 As a member of the Imperial family she will gain, not lose. 
 And the Empire, here as everywhere else, will gain, not lose. 
 
 These ends will be jeopardized if we continue to bind her to 
 the British Parliament, and restrict her own autonomy ac- 
 cordingly. Reciprocally, we damage the British Parliament 
 and gratuitously invite friction and deadlock in the adminis- 
 tration either of British or of Imperial affairs, or both. Of the 
 difficulties raised we can mitigate one only by bringing another 
 into existence. Endeavouring to minimize them all by re- 
 ducing the Irish representation to the lowest point, we either 
 do a gross injustice to Ireland, by diminishing her control 
 over interests vital to her, or, by conceding that control, re- 
 move the necessity for any representation at all. Most Irish 
 Unionists would, I believe, prefer exclusion to retention. One 
 gathers that from the debates of 1893, and the view is in 
 accordance with the traditional Ulster spirit, and the spirit 
 generally displayed by powerful minorities threatened with a, 
 Home Rule to which they object on principle. It was the 
 spirit displayed by the Upper Canadian minority, in 1838-39 
 (vide p. 101), in threatening to leave the Empire rather than 
 submit to Home Rule, and by the Transvaal minority in the 
 lukewarm and divided support given to the half-baked Consti- 
 tution of 1905, and in the hearty welcome given to the full 
 autonomy of 1906. How the Colonists expressed themselves 
 matters nothing. We must make generous allowance for hot 
 party feeling and old prejudices. The Canadian minorities did 
 not really mean to call in the United States, nor does it signify 
 a particle that some of the Johannesburgers vowed that any- 
 thing could be borne which freed them from the interference 
 of a Liberal Government. These opinions are transient and 
 negligible. The spirit is essentially healthy. Paradox as it 
 may seem, the uncompromising attitude of Ulster Unionists, as
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 215 
 
 voiced by the ablest representative they ever had, Colonel 
 Saunderson,* is hopeful for the prospects of Home Rule. They 
 fight doggedly for the Union, but I believe they would prefer 
 a real Home Rule to a half-measure, and in making that choice 
 they would show their virility and courage at its true worth. 
 
 Where are the dangers and difficulties of exclusion ? The 
 dangers first. I believe, from a study of events in the last 
 twenty-five years, that the strongest opposition to it was 
 founded, not so much upon a reluctance to give Ireland powers 
 full enough to render needless her representation at West- 
 minster, but on a jealous desire to keep Irish Members under 
 surveillance, as a dangerous and intractable body of men who 
 would hatch mischief against the Empire if they were allowed 
 to disappear from sight ; the same kind of instinct which 
 urged revolutionary Paris to stop the flight of Louis and to 
 keep him under lock and key. In the case of Ireland it is 
 possible to understand the prevalence of this instinct in 1886, 
 though even then it was irrational enough. But in 1911 we 
 should be ashamed to entertain it. Irish plots against the 
 Empire have passed into electoral scares, and if they had not, 
 representation in London would be no safeguard. We should 
 also dismiss the more rational but groundless view that Im- 
 perial co-operation necessitates representation in a joint 
 Assembly. Conference is a better method. Anyone who 
 studies the proceedings of the last Imperial Conference and 
 observes the number and variety of the subjects discussed 
 and the numerous and valuable decisions arrived at, will 
 realize how much can be done by mutual good-will and the 
 pressure of mutual interest. f 
 
 It may be objected that, with one or two exceptions of quite 
 recent date, the Colonies have contributed nothing to the 
 upkeep of the Empire, except in the very indirect form of 
 maintaining local military forces, that their present tendency 
 
 * E.g. , in 1893, on Clause I. of the Home Rule Bill (Hansard, p. 490) : 
 " The Irish minority were willing to be treated on the footing of a Colony, 
 but they protested against a supremacy which would enable the honourable 
 gentleman who formed the Irish Government to appeal to the Imperial 
 Parliament for the assistance of the Army and Navy to compel the Irish 
 minority to obey their behests." 
 
 f Cd. 5741, 1911. Some of the subjects discussed were Commercial 
 Relations and Shipping, Navigation Law, Labour Exchanges, Uniformity in 
 Copyright, etc., Emigration, Naturalization, Compensation for Accidents, etc.
 
 216 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 unquestionably a sound tendency is to co-operate, not by 
 way of direct money contribution to Imperial funds, but 
 by the construction of local Navies out of their own money, 
 and, in time of peace, under their own immediate control, 
 and that Ireland cannot be allowed to follow their example. 
 The objection has no point. Ireland, through no fault of her 
 own, has reached a stage (if we are to trust the Treasury 
 figures) where she no longer pays any cash contribution to 
 Imperial expenses, nor is it possible to look back with any 
 satisfaction upon the enormous total of her cash contributions 
 in the past. They were not the voluntary offerings of a 
 willing partner, but the product of a joint financial system 
 which, like all consequences of a forced Union, was bad for 
 Ireland. If we consider that a similar attempt to extort an 
 Imperial contribution from the American States led to their 
 secession ; that the principle was definitely abandoned in the 
 case of the later Colonies ; that, on the contrary, large annual 
 sums raised in these islands were, until quite recent times, 
 spent for purposes of defence within these Colonies ; that in 
 the South African War two hundred and fifty million pounds 
 were spent in order to assist British subjects in the Transvaal 
 to obtain the rights of freemen in a self-governing Colony ; 
 and that to this day indirect colonial contributions in the 
 shape of local expenditure are small in proportion to the 
 immense benefit derived from the protection of the Imperial 
 Navy, Army, and Diplomacy, and from the assistance of 
 British credit ; if we then reflect that before the Union Ireland 
 was, in the matter of contribution, somewhat in the same 
 position as Canada or Australia to-day that is, paying no 
 fixed cash tribute, but voluntarily assuming the burden, very 
 heavy in time of war, of certain Army establishments ; that 
 for seventeen years after the Union contributions fixed on a 
 scale grossly inequitable drove her into bankruptcy ; that from 
 1819 until two years ago, she paid, by dint of excessive taxation 
 and in spite of terrible economic depression, a considerable 
 share, and sometimes more than her proportionate share, of 
 Imperial expenditure ;* if, finally, we remember that, cash 
 payments apart, Irishmen for centuries past have taken an 
 important part in manning the Army and Navy, have fought 
 * I am summarizing facts fully narrated in Chapters XI. and XII.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 217 
 
 and died on innumerable battle-fields in the service of the 
 Empire, and have contributed some of its ablest military 
 leaders ; if we consider all these facts soberly and reasonably, 
 we shall, I believe, agree that it would be fair and right to place 
 a Home Ruled Ireland in the position of a self-governing 
 Colony, with a moral obligation to contribute, when her means 
 permit, and in proportion to her means, but without a statutory 
 and compulsory tribute. 
 
 What form should that contribution eventually take ? Does 
 it necessarily follow that Ireland should be given power to 
 construct her own Navy, and raise and control her own troops ? 
 Let us use our common sense, and use it, let me add, fearlessly. 
 If Ireland really wanted full colonial powers, if, like Australia 
 and Canada, she would be discontented and resentful at their 
 denial, we should be wise to grant them, and rely on common 
 interests and affections to secure friendly co-operation. Does 
 it not stand to reason that a friendly alliance even with 
 a foreign power, such as France, to say nothing of the far 
 more intimate relations with a consanguineous Colony, is better 
 business than any arrangement for common forces unwillingly 
 or resentfully acceded to ? But, as I pointed out in Chapter 
 VIII., all these uneasy speculations about independent 
 Irish armaments are superfluous. Ireland does not want 
 separate armaments. The sporadic attempts to discourage 
 enlistment in the Imperial forces are, as every sensible person 
 should recognize, the results of refusing Home Rule. They 
 would have occurred in every Colony under similar circum- 
 stances, and they do occur in one degree or another wherever 
 countries agitate vainly for Home Rule. If Russia misin- 
 terprets such phenomena, we have, let us hope, more political 
 enlightenment than Russia. 
 
 Ireland's strategical situation bears no analogy to that of 
 Australia and Canada, which, for geographical reasons, are 
 compelled, as South Africa will be compelled, to make a 
 certain amount of independent provision, not only for military, 
 but for naval defence, and would be wanting in patriotic 
 feeling if they did otherwise. New Zealand, on the other hand, 
 is too small to be capable of creating a Navy, and rightly con- 
 tributes to ours. We have arrived at an interesting psycho- 
 logical point when Australia and Canada both seem to be
 
 218 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 inclined to reserve, in theory, a right to abstain from en- 
 gaging their Navies in a war undertaken by Great Britain, but 
 nobody will be alarmed by this theoretical reservation. It 
 is an insignificant matter beside the Naval Agreement reached 
 at the last Conference (1911) an agreement worth more than 
 volumes of unwritten statutes to the effect that the per- 
 sonnel of the colonial fleets is to be interchangeable with that 
 of the Imperial fleet and that in a joint war colonial ships are 
 to form an integral part of the British fleet under the control 
 of the Admiralty. With such an agreement in existence, it 
 becomes superfluous to lay stress upon the fact that without 
 formal and complete separation from the Mother Country 
 in time of peace, the neutrality of a Colony would not be recog- 
 nized by a belligerent enemy of Great Britain in time of war. 
 In any case these developments have no concern for Ireland, 
 which does not want, and need not be given, power to raise 
 a local Navy. Nor, with regard to the regular land forces, 
 will anything be changed. Troops quartered in Ireland will be, 
 as before, and as in the Colonies now, under complete Imperial 
 control. So will Imperial camps, magazines, arsenals, dock- 
 yards. On the other hand, arrangements should certainly 
 be made to permit the raising of Volunteer forces in Ireland. 
 There are large numbers of Irishmen in the British Territorial 
 Army, and Ireland sent five companies to the South African 
 War. Though the povertj^ of the country will for a long 
 time check the growth of Volunteer forces, it is the Union 
 which presents the only serious obstacle to their establishment. 
 No surer proof of the need for Home Rule could be adduced 
 than the fact that it was held to be impossible to extend the 
 Territorial system to Ireland. One of the objects of Home 
 Rule is to remove this suspicious atmosphere. Whether local 
 power to organize and arm Volunters in Ireland should be 
 given to the Irish authority, or, as in the Home Rule Bills of 
 1886 and 1893, reserved to the Imperial Government, is, if 
 we trust Ireland, as we must, a secondary and not a vital 
 matter, which would not affect the question of representation 
 at Westminster.* Probably it would be most convenient to 
 
 * In the Federal Constitutions of Australia and Canada the central Federal 
 Parliament is responsible for the colonial defences, but the Provinces or 
 States are, of course, represented in the Federal Parliament.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 219 
 
 leave the matters in the hands of the Irish Legislature. In 
 any case, the Command-in-Chief of all forces in Ireland, 
 regular or volunteer, would, as in the Colonies,* be vested 
 in the King. 
 
 The control of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin 
 Metropolitan Police does not affect the question of repre- 
 sentation at Westminster. With or without representation, 
 Ireland should be given the control of all her own police forces 
 from the first, without the restrictions imposed by the Bills 
 of 1886 and 1893 with regard to Imperial control of the exist- 
 ing forces.| 
 
 With the important exception of taxation, with which I 
 shall deal last, no other power which should properly be 
 reserved to the Imperial Parliament, or delegated to the Irish 
 Parliament, has any appreciable bearing upon the exclusion 
 of Irish Members from the House of Commons. Nor do any 
 of them raise issues which are likely to be troublesome. 
 Common sense and mutual convenience should decide them. 
 The Army, Navy, and other military forces I have already 
 dealt with. The Crown, the Lord-Lieutenant, War and Peace, 
 Prize and Booty of War, Foreign Relations and Treaties (with 
 the exception of commercial Treaties), Titles, Extradition, 
 Neutrality,! and Treason, are subjects upon which the Colonies 
 have no power to legislate or act, and of which it would be 
 needless, strictly, to make any formal statutory exception 
 in the case of Ireland, though the exception no doubt will 
 be made in the Bill. Naturalization, Coinage, Copyright, 
 Patents, Trademarks, are all matters in which the Colonies 
 have local powers, whose existence, and the limitations 
 attaching to them, are determined either solely by con- 
 stitutional custom or with the addition of an implied or 
 express statutory authority . The two former would, I 
 should think, be wholly reserved to the Imperial Parliament. 
 
 * Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900, Sec. 58, and 
 British North America Act, 1867, Sec. 15. Until quite recently it was the 
 custom always to give the command of the Canadian Militia to a British 
 officer lent to Canada. The present Commander, however, is a Canadian. 
 
 f See Appendix. 
 
 J A Colony may make local regulations to carry out an Imperial Law about 
 extradition and neutrality, but may not touch the law. 
 
 For the constitutional position of self-governing Colonies, the author 
 owes much to Mr. Moore's "Commonwealth of Australia."
 
 220 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 In the case of the latter three, which were wholly reserved in 
 the Bill of 1886 and 1893, Ireland might be placed in the 
 position of a self-governing Colony.* 
 
 In Trade and Navigation it would be wise to take the same 
 course. The Home Rule Bill of 1886, without giving Ireland 
 representation at Westminster, denied her all powers over 
 Trade and Navigation. The Bill of 1893 gave her powers over 
 Trade within Ireland and Inland Navigation, and these powers 
 at any rate should be given in the coming Bill, together 
 with the larger functions also ; though Ireland would naturally 
 leave in operation the great bulk of the statutes concerned, 
 since they intimately affect the commercial and industrial 
 relations of the two countries. For the rest, Ireland no more 
 than the Colonies can be freed from a measure of Imperial 
 control maintained by Acts like the Merchant Shipping Act 
 of 1894. 
 
 The Postal Service in Ireland should, as in the Bill of 1886, 
 come under Irish control. 
 
 In the Home Rule Bill of 1893 (Section 34) it was laid 
 down that for three years the Irish Legislature should not 
 " pass an Act respecting the relations of landlord or tenant, 
 or the sale, purchase, or letting of land generally." Such 
 
 * The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900, and the British 
 North America Act, 1867, in order to delimit the respective powers of the 
 Federal and Provincial Legislatures, set out a list of subjects on which the 
 Federal Parliament has exclusive or collateral power to legislate. There is 
 implied, of course, a pre-existing right on the part of the Colony, as a whole, 
 qua Colony, to legislate on the matters referred to in the list. But the pre- 
 existing right is subject to any pre-existing constitutional or statutory limita- 
 tions. H.g-, " Naturalization and Aliens " is in the list of Commonwealth 
 powers (Sec. 51, xix.), and of the Canadian powers (Sec. 91, xxv.), but the 
 power of any Colony is limited by Acts of 1847 and 1879 to giving naturaliza- 
 tion within its own borders. (At the Imperial Conference of 1911 a scheme 
 was foreshadowed for standardizing naturalization throughout the Empire.) 
 
 " Copyright" is also in both lists, but the colonial power is limited by the 
 International Copyright Act of 1886, which, by Sec. 8, implies that a "British 
 possession " may only make laws " respecting the Copyright within the 
 limits of such possession of works produced in that possession." This Copy- 
 right Act is an example of implied limitation and sanction together. The 
 Coinage Act of 1853 is an example of implied sanction only, in empowering a 
 Colony to legislate as if the Act had not been passed. Another class of 
 Imperial Acts confers direct powers to legislate on certain subjects e.g., the 
 Australian Colonies Custom Duties Act of 1873 (removing the restrictions 
 imposed upon intercolonial duties in 1850). The Naturalization Acts are 
 partly of this character, and other examples are the Colonial Naval Defence 
 Act of 1865, and certain provisions of the Army Act of 1881, and the Colonial 
 Courts of Admiralty Act of 1890.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 221 
 
 a provision repeated in the coming Bill would be inconsistent 
 with the absence of Irish Members from Westminster. But 
 I take it for granted that there is no question of its repetition. 
 At first it might appear that Land Purchase should De dis- 
 tinguished from other branches of land legislation and re- 
 served to the Imperial Government on the ground that it 
 needs Imperial credit. I shall deal with this point fully in 
 Chapter XIV., and only need here to express the view that 
 Land Purchase cannot be separated from other branches of 
 land legislation, or from the Congested Districts Board, or 
 even from the control of the police, and that we are bound to 
 give, and shall be acting wisely in giving, all these powers to 
 the Irish Legislature from the first. 
 
 It is necessary perhaps to add that non-representation at 
 Westminster does not in the smallest degree affect the complete 
 legal supremacy of the Imperial Parliament over the sub- 
 ordinate Irish Legislature. This Legislature will in legal 
 language be a " local and territorial " body, like those of the 
 Colonies. It will be the creature of Parliament, and could be 
 amended or even extinguished by it in a subsequent Act. 
 The Bill of 1886 (perhaps because it never reached the Com- 
 mittee stage) said nothing explicit about the supremacy, 
 though the Bill of 1893, while providing for representation at 
 Westminster, repeatedly (and sometimes quite superfluously) 
 affirmed it in the Preamble, for example, and in a rider to 
 Clause 2. The King's authority, through the Lord-Lieutenant, 
 will be supreme in Ireland, as, through the Governors, it is 
 supreme in the Colonies. Every Irish Bill, like every Colonial 
 Bill, will require the Royal Assent, given through the Lord- 
 Lieutenant, who will correspond to the Colonial Governors. 
 The Lord-Lieutenant, like his colonial counterpart, will have 
 to exercise both his Executive and Legislative functions in a 
 double capacity : in the first instance by the advice of his 
 Irish Cabinet, but subject to a veto by the British Cabinet. 
 This dual capacity has belonged to all Colonial Governors ever 
 since the principle of responsible government was established. 
 As I showed in earlier chapters, it was regarded even by Lord 
 John Russell as impossible and absurd as late as 1840 ; but it 
 ought by now to be understood by every educated man, and 
 we may hope to be spared the philosophical disquisitions and
 
 222 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 hair-splitting criticisms which it evoked from men who should 
 have known better in the Home Rule debates of 1893. 
 
 Laws framed at Westminster will be applicable to Ireland, 
 as they are frequently made applicable to the Colonies.* 
 Conversely, only through the express legislative authority of 
 Westminster will an Irish, like a Colonial Act,f be held to 
 operate outside the borders of Ireland. 
 
 Apart from the strict legal omnipotence of Imperial sover- 
 eignty, it is, of course, impossible to say now what the exact 
 constitutional position of Ireland will be under any form of 
 Home Rule. No Bill can state it fully in set terms. Time, 
 custom, and judicial decisions will build up a body of doctrine. 
 It is so with the Colonies, whose exact constitutional relations 
 with the Mother Country are still a matter of juristic debate, and 
 are only to be deduced from the study of an immense number 
 of judicial decisions and of Imperial Acts passed subsequently 
 to the grant of the original Constitutions. Some of these Acts 
 I have already illustrated. The one Act of general applica- 
 tion, namely, the Colonial Laws Validity Act, cannot be 
 read without the rest, though in form it appears to contain a 
 complete set of rules. While giving general power to a self- 
 governing Colony " to make laws for the peace, welfare, and 
 good government of the Colony " (words which will also 
 necessarily appear in the Home Rule Bill), the Act makes 
 void all colonial laws or parts of laws which are " repugnant to 
 the provisions of any Act of Parliament extending to the 
 Colony to which such law shall relate," and this provision will 
 no doubt, be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Ireland, as it was 
 in Section 32 of the Home Rule Bill of 1893. The Irish Legis- 
 lature, that is, will be able " to repeal or alter any enactments 
 in force in Ireland except such as either relate to matters 
 beyond the power of the Irish Legislature, or, being enacted by 
 Parliament after the passing of this Act, may be expressly 
 extended to Ireland." 
 
 It will be noticed that the words " beyond the power of the 
 Irish Legislature " referred to the subjects expressly excepted 
 
 * E.g., Colonial Attorneys Belief Act, 1857 ; Colonial Probates Act, 1892 ; 
 parts of the Finance Act, 1894 ; and Wills Act, 1861. 
 
 ( E.g., Colonial Laws made under sanction of the following Imperial Acts : 
 Colonial Prisoners Removal, 1869 ; Merchant Shipping, 1894 ; Sections 478 
 and 736, Colonial Marriages, 1866.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 223 
 
 in the Bill itself. This is one of the points in which the Irish 
 Constitution will bear at any rate a superficial resemblance 
 to that of a Province or State within a Federation rather than 
 to that of a self-governing Colony. The practice of expressly, 
 and in the text of a Constitution, forbidding a self-governing 
 Colony to legislate upon certain subjects, or of expressly 
 reserving concurrent or exclusive powers of legislation to the 
 Mother Country, has fallen into disuse since the establishment 
 of the principle of responsible government. Such restrictions 
 were inserted in the Canadian Union Act of 1840, where the old 
 right of the Mother Country to impose customs duties in the 
 Colonies for the regulation of commerce was reaffirmed, and even 
 in the Acts of 1855 for giving full powers of self-government 
 to the Australian Colonies, which were forbidden to impose 
 intercolonial customs, though they were expressly granted 
 the power of imposing any other customs duties they pleased, * 
 but they do not appear in modern Constitutions, for example 
 in the Transvaal Constitution of 1906. As I have indicated, 
 this implies no change in the strict legal theory of Colonial 
 subordination to the Mother Country ; for, although the ten- 
 dency of modern juristic thought is to ascribe " plenary" power 
 to a Colony, restrictions nevertheless do exist in practice, and are 
 contained, express or implicit, in a number of disjointed Acts. 
 
 A Federating Colony, on the other hand, like a foreign 
 Federation, has in its own self-made, domestic Constitution to 
 apportion powers with some approach to precision between 
 the federal and the provincial authorities, and in this respect 
 the Irish Bill, in reserving certain powers to the Imperial 
 Parliament, will resemble a federating Bill, and it should 
 follow the American and Australian precedents in leaving 
 residuary powers to the subordinate or Irish Legislature, not, 
 in accordance with the Canadian precedent, to the Parliament 
 at Westminster. That is an indispensable corollary of ex- 
 cluding Irish Members from Westminster 
 
 In speaking of powers reserved or delegated, and of residuary 
 or unallocated powers, I have thus far referred only to powers 
 which must be exercised, or at any rate may need to be exer- 
 cised, if not by the subordinate legislature, then by the superior 
 Parliament. Those restrictions on the Irish Legislature which 
 * E.g., 18 Viet. Ch. 55, Sections 42 and 43.
 
 224 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 are imposed in order to protect the religious or economic in- 
 terests of a minority within the State, or as a recognition that 
 there are certain kinds of laws which it is morally wrong to 
 pass, fall into an altogether different category. By implica- 
 tion they morally bind the superior Parliament too, and are 
 irrelevant, therefore, to the question of representation. They 
 will be necessary, no doubt, in the coming Irish Bill, though 
 they need not be so extensive as those which are to be found in 
 Clause 4 of the Bill of 1893, some of which are borrowed from 
 the famous anti-slavery amendments of 1865- 1869 to the Con- 
 stitution of the United States.* In inserting them we shall 
 again be following the " Federal " rather than the " Colonial " 
 model. No such restrictions have been imposed by the 
 Mother Country upon any self-governing Colony. The nearest 
 approach, perhaps, to such a tendency was the provision in 
 the Transvaal Constitution of 1906 (Section 39), that " any 
 law whereby persons not of European birth or descent may be 
 subjected or made liable to any disabilities or restrictions to 
 which persons of European birth or descent are not also sub- 
 jected or made liable " should be specially "reserved" that 
 is, sent home by the Governor for the signification of the 
 Royal pleasure ; but no similar provision appeared in the Act 
 of 1909 for constituting the South African Union. In Federal 
 systems, on the other hand, such restrictions, taking the form 
 of self-denying ordinances, are common, whether appearing 
 in the Federal Constitution itself or in the subordinate State 
 Constitutions. The Constitution of the United States, for 
 example, in addition to the anti-slavery provisions noted above, 
 enacts that the National Government cannot (by Amend- 
 ment I.) establish any religion or prohibit its free exercise, 
 or (by Amendment V.) take private property for public use 
 without just compensation, or (by Article 1, 9) grant a 
 title of nobility. Neither (by Amendment XIV. and Article 1, 
 10 respectively) can a State do these things. By Article 1, 
 10, a State cannot pass a law impairing the obligation of a 
 contract. Exactly similar restrictions appear in many of the 
 individual State Constitutions. Others forbid the estab- 
 lishment of any church or sect ; the introduction of armed 
 
 * See Appendix, under the head of restrictions on " Irish Matters." 
 For convenience, land legislation is included in the list, though it clearly 
 belongs to a different category, and I have so dealt with it above.
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 225 
 
 men " for the suppression of domestic violence " ; " perpetuities 
 or monopolies," and a variety of other things. Analogous 
 provisions are to be found in the British North America Act, 
 1867 (constituting the Dominion of Canada), where the pro- 
 vincial Legislatures are forbidden to interfere with certain 
 rights and privileges of religious bodies in the matter of educa- 
 tion. There are no limitations of the kind in the Australian 
 Commonwealth Act of 1900. Australia, no doubt, correctly 
 represents the tendency of modern thought on this matter. 
 Some of the American safeguards have produced great incon- 
 venience. Nor can it be denied that the most elaborately 
 contrived legal safeguards are of less value than the moral 
 safeguard afforded by the sense of honour, justice, and pru- 
 dence in the community. The existence of these qualities 
 in Ireland, as in other white countries, is the true foundation 
 of Home Rule. Some day Irishmen will ask, as a united 
 country, for the repeal of these statutory safeguards. 
 
 That brings me to the penultimate point of importance, 
 which may be held to affect the inclusion or exclusion of Irish 
 Members at Westminster I mean the question of future 
 constitutional amendment. Here the colonial analogies are 
 a little complicated. Since the Australian Colonies Act of 1850, 
 in the new grant of a Constitution to a self-governing Colony, 
 power has invariably been given to amend its own Constitution, 
 without, of course, detracting from any powers specified in 
 it for preserving the sovereignty of the Mother Country. 
 Canada, when federating in 1867, took the somewhat singular 
 course of making no provision in her Federal Constitution for 
 its subsequent amendment, though, by Section 92 of the 
 British North America Act, she gave her Provinces the ex- 
 clusive right to amend their own Constitutions, a right which 
 three of them have used to abolish their Upper Chambers. 
 The Dominion Constitution, then, cannot be amended otherwise 
 than by an Imperial Act. Such amending Acts are pro- 
 moted by the Dominion Government without any specially 
 devised machinery for ascertaining the public opinion of 
 Canadians. Australia, on the other hand, when federating 
 in 1900, made elaborate arrangements, which have been put 
 several times into operation, for the amendment of the Federal 
 Constitution by the Australian people itself, without an Im- 
 
 15
 
 226 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 perial Act. Now, it will follow as a matter of course that 
 Ireland will be given powers, as in both the previous Bills,* to 
 amend her own Constitution within certain defined limits, after 
 a certain lapse of time, and without encroaching upon Imperial 
 authority. For my part I would strongly urge that the powers 
 now to be conferred should be much wider ; for I believe that 
 Ireland alone can make a really perfect Constitution for herself. 
 But, that point apart, the question arises of the further amend- 
 ment, outside such permissive powers, of the Home Rule Act 
 itself, which will, of course, contain within its four corners 
 the whole of the Irish Constitution, so far as it can be written 
 down. No special arrangements were made for such a con- 
 tingency in the Bill of 1893, presumably because Ireland was 
 to be represented at Westminster and would have a share in 
 the making of any amending act. In the Bill of 1886, which 
 excluded the Irish Members, Mr. Gladstone proposed (in 
 Clause 39) that no alteration of the Act should be made (apart, 
 of course, from points left for Irish alteration) except (1) by 
 an Imperial Act formally assented to by the Irish Legislature, 
 or (2) by an Imperial Act for the passing of which a stated 
 number of Members of both branches of the Irish Legislature 
 should be summoned to sit at Westminster. 
 
 It will be clear, I think, now, in 1911, that this latter pro- 
 posal is not worth revival. No substantial amendment of the 
 Act should properly be made without the formal consent of 
 the Irish Legislature, representing Irish public opinion, and the 
 prior consultation with the Irish Cabinet which such consent 
 would imply. If the lamentable necessity ever arose of 
 amending the Act against the wishes of Ireland, the sudden 
 invasion of Westminster by a body of angry Irish Members, 
 too small to affect the result (for otherwise the attempt to amend 
 would not be made) and large enough to revive the old political 
 dislocation and passion, would not simplify the process of 
 amendment or be of value to anybody concerned. The 
 proposal was probably only suggested by a vague leaning 
 towards the Federal principle, which, in the present case, we 
 should certainly reject. It serves indeed as one more illustra- 
 
 * In the Bill of 1886 (Clause 11, Subsec. 7) and in the Bill of 1893 
 (Clause 8, Subsec. 3) power was given to alter the qualifications of the 
 franchise, etc., for the Lower House in the former Bill after the first 
 dissolution, in the latter after six years.
 
 THE FKAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 227 
 
 tion of the anomalies which might result from the inclusion of 
 Irish Members at Westminster. No more unhealthy position 
 could be imagined than one which would render it possible 
 for an amendment of the Home Rule Act, whether in the 
 direction of greater latitude or of stricter limitation, to depend 
 solely upon the Irish vote in an Assembly predominately non- 
 Irish. That is not to the discredit of Ireland. The system 
 would be just as indefensible, whatever the subordinate State 
 concerned. It would be Federalism run mad, and would make 
 Alexander Hamilton turn in his grave. It is worth while to 
 note that, even under a sane and normal Federal system, the 
 Irish Constitution would be less easily alterable in either 
 direction than under the plan of treating her as a self-governing 
 Colony. In the latter case action is direct and simple, while 
 most Federal Constitutions are extraordinarily difficult to 
 amend . The Dominion of Canada is only an apparent exception . 
 
 I turn lastly to Finance, the point which most closely affects 
 representation at Westminster, and which distinguishes any 
 form of quasi-Federal Home Rule most sharply from its alter- 
 native, " Colonial " Home Rule. 
 
 All Federal systems necessarily involve a certain amount of 
 joint finance between the superior and the inferior Government. 
 The distribution of financial powers varies widely in different 
 Federations, but all have this feature in common that the 
 central or superior Government controls Customs and Excise, 
 and is to a large degree financed by means of the revenue 
 derived from those sources. The United States Government, 
 as distinguished from that of the individual States, pays in 
 this way for almost its entire expenditure.* So does the 
 Dominion of Canada ;f while in the Australian Commonwealth 
 the receipts from Customs and Excise alone more than cover the 
 whole Commonwealth expenditure. J 
 
 * In 1910, of the total Federal revenue of 675,511,715 dollars, 623,616,963 
 dollars were raised in this way, or twelve-thirteenths. (Postal revenue, which 
 balances Postal receipts, is excluded.) 
 
 f In 1909-10 Dominion revenue from Customs and Excise was 75,409,487 
 dollars. Total ordinary expenditure (excluding capital accounts), 79,411,747 
 dollars. 
 
 J Estimate for 1910-11. Total Federal revenue, .16,841,629 ; revenue 
 from Customs and Excise, 11,700,000. Total Federal expenditure, 
 11,122,297. 5,267,500 will be available for return to the State ex- 
 chequers (see pp. 245-246).
 
 228 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Finance makes or mars Federations. Some Federations or 
 organic Unions of independent States have come into being 
 through a strong desire in the separate States to have, among 
 other things, a common system of Customs, and in the case of 
 the German Empire and the South African Union a Customs 
 Union or Zollverein has preceded Federation. These pheno- 
 mena are the most marked illustration of the general truth 
 that a common desire to federate, or unite, on the part of 
 individual States is a condition precedent to a sound Federa- 
 tion or Union. On the other hand, finance, especially the 
 question of joint Customs, has sometimes presented obstacles 
 to a Federation which, on other grounds, was earnestly desired. 
 The long delay in achieving the Australian Federation was 
 largely due to the desire of New South Wales to maintain her 
 Free Trade system, while the financial arrangements generally 
 caused most of the practical difficulties met with in arranging 
 the Federation both of Canada and Australia, and in their 
 subsequent domestic relations. Nova Scotia in the former 
 case, and Western Australia in the latter, held out to the last 
 instant, and the former subsequently had to receive excep- 
 tionally favourable treatment. In both Federations some 
 measure of friction is chronic, and in neither has a perfectly 
 satisfactory system been evolved. The Union of Ireland and 
 Great Britain in 1800 was in this respect, as in all others, a 
 flagrant departure from sound principle. The Customs Union 
 which followed it was a forced Customs Union, and, together 
 with the other financial arrangements between the two coun- 
 tries, has produced results incredibly absurd and mischievous. 
 Some of these results I briefly indicated in Chapter V. In the 
 following chapters I shall tell the whole story fully, and I hope 
 to convince the reader that we should follow, not only his- 
 torically, but morally and practically, the correct line of 
 action if, in dissolving the Legislative Union, we dissolve the 
 Customs Union also. That would involve a virtually indepen- 
 dent system of finance for Ireland, and place her fiscally in 
 the position of a self-governing Colony. If and when a real 
 Federation of the United Kingdom becomes practical politics, 
 she would then have the choice of entering it in the spirit and 
 on the terms invariably associated with all true Federations or 
 Unions. That is, she would voluntarily relinquish, in her own
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 229 
 
 interest, financial and other rights to a central Government 
 solely concerned with central affairs. 
 
 I need scarcely point out in this connection the vital impor- 
 tance of the question of representation at Westminster. Ire- 
 land resembles the self-governing Colonies, and differs from 
 Great Britain, in that the greater part of the revenue raised 
 from her inhabitants is derived from Customs and Excise 
 that is, from the indirect taxation of commodities of common 
 use. If she is denied control of these sources of revenue under 
 the coming Bill, it will be absolutely necessary, in spite of all 
 the concomitant difficulties, to give her a representation at 
 Westminster which is as effective as it can be made. But 
 let it be realized that we could not make her control over her 
 own finance as effective as that exercised by a small State 
 within a Federation, because such a State, however small, has 
 equal, or at any rate disproportionately large, representation 
 in the Federal Upper Chamber, and Federal Upper Chambers 
 can reject Money Bills. The Upper Chamber in Ireland's 
 case would be the House of Lords, where she could scarcely be 
 given effective representation, and which, in any case, cannot 
 reject Money Bills. 
 
 Let us now examine Ireland's claim for fiscal autonomy.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 UNION FINANCE 
 
 I ASK the reader to follow with particular care the following 
 historical summary of Anglo-Irish finance. None of it is irrele- 
 vant, I venture to say. It is not possible to construct a finan- 
 cial scheme, or to criticize it when framed, without a fairly 
 accurate knowledge of the historical facts. 
 
 I. 
 BEFORE THE UNION.* 
 
 Before the Union Ireland had a fiscal system distinct from 
 that of Great Britain, a separate Exchequer, a separate Debt, 
 a separate system of taxation, a separate Budget. Yet she 
 can never truly be said to have had financial independence, 
 because she was never a truly self-governing country. Until 
 1779, when the Protestant Volunteers protested with arms 
 in their hands against the annihilation of Irish industries 
 in the interest of British merchants and growers, her external 
 trade and, consequently, her internal production, were abso- 
 lutely at the mercy of Great Britain. As I showed in Chap- 
 ter I., Ireland was treated considerably worse than the 
 most oppressed Colony, with permanently ruinous results. 
 On the other hand, her internal taxation, never above a million 
 a year, and her Debt, never above two millions in amount, 
 were not heavy. But from 1779, through Grattan's Parlia- 
 ment to the Union, a short period of twenty-one years, Ireland, 
 though still governed on the ascendancy system by an unre- 
 presentative and corrupt Parliament of exactly the same 
 
 * The Treasury Returns of 1869, " Public Income and Expenditure," in 
 two volumes, are the basis of all information up to that date. 
 
 230
 
 UNION FINANCE 231 
 
 composition as before, nevertheless had financial independence 
 in the sense that her Parliament had complete control of Irish 
 taxation, revenue, and trade. It was, moreover, in these 
 financial matters that the Parliament showed most genuine 
 national patriotism, together with a greatly enhanced measure 
 of the Imperial patriotism traditional with it. Internal taxa- 
 tion, except in time of war, was still comparatively light ; 
 depressed home industries were judiciously encouraged by 
 bounties ; no attempt was made at vindictive retaliation upon 
 British imports, though Irish exports to Great Britain were 
 still unmercifully penalized ; and sums, growing to a relatively 
 enormous size during the French War, which began in 1793, 
 were annually voted for the Imperial forces. This voluntary 
 contribution, which had averaged 585,000 in the eleven years 
 of peace, from 1783 to 1793, rose to 3,401,760 in 1797,* and 
 in 1799, when Ireland was paying the bill for British troops 
 called in to suppress her own Rebellion, to 4,596,762, out of 
 a total Irish expenditure for the year on all purposes, military 
 and civil, of 6,854,804. Not more than half, on the average, 
 of these war expenses were met out of the annual taxes. Debt 
 was created to meet the balance ; but neither the debt, heavy 
 as it was, nor the taxes, were intolerably burdensome that is, 
 if we regard Ireland as financially responsible for Imperial 
 wars and for the suppression of a Rebellion which was pro- 
 voked by scandalous misgovernment. Tax revenue rose 
 from 1,106,504 in 1783, when the free Parliament first pre- 
 pared a Budget, to 3,017,758 in 1800, and averaged a million 
 and a half. In the same period the total amount of the 
 funded and unfunded Irish Debt rose from 1,917,784 to 
 28,541,157, almost the whole of this increase having taken 
 place in the seven years of war immediately preceding the Union. 
 In Great Britain both Debt and taxation had risen in a 
 larger ratio, and were relatively far greater. For example, 
 in the six years, 1793-1798 inclusive, 186,000,000 had been 
 added to the British Debt, only 14,000,000 to the Irish Debt. 
 In 1801 the British Debt stood at 489,127,057 ; the Irish Debt 
 at 32,215,223. 
 
 * Mr. Secretary Pelham in this year estimated that Ireland, though con- 
 tributing nothing in money to the Navy, had furnished no less than 38,000 
 men to the Navy since the beginning of the war.
 
 232 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 II. 
 
 FROM THE UNION TO THE FINANCIAL RELATIONS COMMISSION 
 
 OF 1894-1896. 
 
 The Union of 1800, therefore, could not be justified on the 
 ground that a poor country would profit by fiscal amalgama- 
 tion with a rich country, and Pitt and Castlereagh, when 
 framing the Union Act, recognized that truth by leaving Ireland 
 with a separate fiscal system, as before ; though the administra- 
 tion of this system was, of course, now to be wholly in British 
 hands. There were to be separate Exchequers, Debts,* taxes, 
 and balance-sheets, with the following restrictions : That pro- 
 hibitions against imports and bounties on exports (corn 
 excepted), should cease reciprocally in both countries ; that, 
 with the exception of 10 per cent, ad valorem duties on a variety 
 of articles named, there should be mutual free trade ; and that 
 no tax on any article of consumption should be higher in 
 Ireland than in Great Britain. 
 
 But although Pitt and Castlereagh ostensibly carried out 
 the principle of separate fiscal systems, they laid the founda- 
 tions for a fiscal amalgamation which was disastrous to Ireland. 
 Since his Commercial Propositions of 1785, Pitt had never 
 abandoned the idea of obtaining from Ireland an obligatory 
 annual contribution to Imperial services based on some fixed 
 principle. By Clause 7 of the Act of Union he achieved his 
 aim. It was settled that for twenty years Ireland should 
 contribute in the proportion of 1 to 7J (or 2 to 15) that is, 
 that Great Britain should pay y~, or 88-24 per cent., of common 
 Imperial expenses, including the charge for debt contracted 
 for Imperial services, and Ireland T 2 r , or 11-76 per cent. 
 Nobody now denies that this ratio was grossly unjust to Ireland. 
 It took no account of the relative pre-Union Debts ; it took 
 no account of the tribute of nearly four millions paid in rents 
 to absentee English proprietors ; it was based on superficial 
 deductions from inadequate and misleading data, and the 
 Act was hardly passed before its absurdity became manifest. 
 
 * Pre-Union Debts were to be separate. Post-Union Debt contracted for 
 Imperial services was to be regarded as joint, and its charge was to be borne 
 by the two countries in the proportions of their respective contributions (see 
 below) ; but post-Union Debt contracted by Ireland for domestic services 
 was to be kept separate.
 
 UNION FINANCE 
 
 233 
 
 Fifteen years of almost incessant war followed the Union. 
 Ireland, even by raising taxation to the highest possible 
 point, was unable to pay her contribution without contracting 
 a Debt colossal in proportion to her resources. While Great 
 Britain only doubled her Debt, and paid 71 per cent, of her 
 expenses out of current taxation, the Irish Debt quadrupled, 
 and in 1817 reached the portentous total of 112,634,773; 
 while only 49 per cent, of Irish expenditure was paid for out 
 of revenue. Here is a little table which shows the effect upon 
 Ireland of Clause 7 of the Act of Union : 
 
 Five Years. 
 
 
 
 
 Average 
 Revenue. 
 
 Average 
 Expenditure. 
 
 ( 1785-1790 
 
 
 
 
 1,246,000 
 
 
 1,247,000 
 
 Before Union \ 1790-1795 
 
 
 
 
 1,340,000 
 
 1,646,000 
 
 ( 1795-1800 
 
 
 
 
 2,100,000 
 
 4,601,000 
 
 ( 1801-1806 
 
 
 
 
 3,643,000 
 
 7,270,000 
 
 After Union \ 1806-1811 
 
 
 
 
 4,885,000 
 
 9,061,000 
 
 1 1811-1816 
 
 
 
 
 5,927,424 
 
 13,188,000 
 
 The scandal could no longer be overlooked. It was impossible 
 to raise the Irish taxes. Their yield was already showing 
 signs of diminishing. But the Act of Union had provided 
 for the situation which had arisen. One of the sections of 
 the famous Clause 7 enacted that if and when the separate 
 Debts of the two countries should reach the proportion of 
 their respective Imperial contributions, Parliament might, 
 if it thought fit, declare that all future expenses of the United 
 Kingdom should be defrayed indiscriminately by equal taxes 
 imposed on the same articles in both countries, " subject only to 
 such exemptions and abatements in favour of Ireland as circum- 
 stances may appear from time to time to demand." The framers 
 of this section had anticipated that the English Debt would sink 
 to the level of the Irish Debt. Anglo-Irish finance teems with 
 grim jokes of this sort ; but the section was useful in either 
 event. With its terms before them, a Committee sat to 
 consider the state of Ireland, with the result that, by an Act 
 which came into operation on January 5, 1817, the Exchequers, 
 Debts, revenues, and expenditures, but not as yet the taxes, 
 of the two countries were amalgamated. In Professor Oldham's
 
 234 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 words,* "the corpse of Ireland's insolvency was huddled into 
 the grave, and no questions were to be asked." The whole 
 expenditure, .Imperial and local, of the United Kingdom, 
 Ireland included, was to be defrayed out of a Consolidated 
 Fund, and the arrangements, therefore, for a separate Irish 
 contribution on a fixed basis to Imperial services were can- 
 celled. Henceforth her Imperial contribution, for anyone 
 who troubled to calculate it, was represented by the excess of 
 revenue raised within Ireland over the expenditure in Ireland. 
 A mutual free trade was also established, not instantaneously, 
 but in the course of a few years. By 1824 all duties, as be- 
 tween Ireland and England, had ceased, and in 1826 the 
 custom-houses ceased to record the transit of goods between 
 England and Ireland, except in articles such as spirits, on 
 which a different excise duty was charged. No statistics 
 were compiled, therefore, of Anglo-Irish trade until ninety 
 years later, when the Irish Department of Agriculture began 
 to prepare returns. Such was the origin of our Customs 
 Union against the world (for, needless to say, those were still 
 the days of high Protection), and it is instructive to compare 
 it with the voluntary pacts of the German States and South 
 African Colonies, and with their political results. 
 
 In one important point unification was left incomplete. 
 It was impossible in 1817 to equalize internal taxation in the 
 two countries, though it was held desirable to do so, because 
 Ireland could not have borne the higher British scale, and 
 suffered enough under her own. Regard, too, was had at 
 first to those important words in the Act of Union which 
 guaranteed to Ireland such " exemptions and abatements " 
 as might appear fair. But they were soon forgotten. With- 
 out any inquiry into the taxable capacity of Ireland, the 
 stamp, tea, and tobacco duties were equalized early in the 
 period, the enhancement in Ireland of the last duty from Is. to 
 3s. on raw tobacco, and from Is. to 16s. on manufactured 
 tobacco, laying an exceptionally heavy burden on the Irish 
 poor. Meanwhile the abolition, after the close of the war, of 
 taxes representing about sixteen millions a year, and purely 
 affecting Great Britain, gave a relief to her which Ireland did 
 not feel. But it was not until 1853, when Mr. Gladstone 
 
 * Eight lectures delivered in the National University, Dublin, in 1911.
 
 UNION FINANCE 235 
 
 extended the income-tax to Ireland, and raised the Irish spirit 
 duty, that the principle of " exemptions and abatements " was 
 most seriously infringed. Mr. Disraeli followed in 1855 with a 
 further elevation of the spirit duty, which was finally equalized 
 with the British duty in 1858, at 8s. a gallon ; while in 1860 
 both duties were raised to 10s. In the seven years 1853- 
 1860 the taxation of Ireland was raised by no less than two 
 and a half millions per annum. It will be recalled that the 
 great famine had taken place in 1846-47, and that between 
 the Census of 1841 and that of 1861 the population sank from 
 eight to six millions, while the British population rose from 
 eighteen and a half to twenty-three millions. The statistical 
 result of the increased taxes, therefore, was to show a rise in 
 taxation per head of the Irish people from 13s. lid. in 1849 
 to 1 5s. 4d. in 1859, while in Great Britain it rose only from 
 2 7s. 8d. to 2 10s. during the same period. Equality of 
 taxation has never been wholly established, for to this day 
 a few quite unimportant taxes are not levied, or are levied on a 
 lower scale in Ireland ;* but from 1858 onward we may regard 
 the taxation of the two countries as almost identically the same. 
 In the meantime a great revolution, also beginning at the 
 time of the famine, had taken place in the fiscal system of 
 the United Kingdom. Free Trade with the outside world 
 had been established, and whatever we may conclude about its 
 effect, it had been established, as we know, with a special view 
 to British industrial interests, and without the smallest 
 concern for Irish interests, which were predominantly agri- 
 cultural. It was certainly followed by an immense in- 
 dustrial expansion and prosperity in Great Britain ; it was 
 certainly initiated at the lowest point of Ireland's moral and 
 physical wretchedness. Opinions differ as to the precise eco- 
 nomic effect upon Ireland. Miss Murray, in her thoughtful and 
 exhaustive study of the commercial relations between England 
 and Ireland, holds that, as agricultural producers, the Irish 
 lost far more than they have gained as consumers of foodstuffs, 
 while a number of small and struggling rural industries, whose 
 powerful counterparts in Great Britain could easily with- 
 stand foreign competition, did undeniably succumb in Ireland. 
 
 * Inhabited house duty, railway passenger tax, carriages, armorial bearings, 
 etc. The license for dogs is half the English scale.
 
 236 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 My own opinion is that the past influence upon Ireland of 
 free trade, in the first instance with Great Britain, and later 
 with the outside world, though a highly interesting and im- 
 portant topic in itself, is commonly exaggerated, to the neglect 
 of the vastly more important question of the tenure of land. 
 Free trade did not cause the famine. On the contrary, 
 the presage of the famine was one of the minor causes which 
 induced Peel to take up Cobden's policy for the free importa- 
 tion of foodstuffs. The effect of that policy upon Ireland 
 sinks into insignificance beside an agrarian system which had 
 reduced the mass of the Irish peasants to serfs, kept them 
 near the borders of destitution, and in a state of sporadic 
 crime for a century and a half before, and for forty years 
 after the repeal of the Corn Laws, and, at the climax of a 
 period of high protection for agricultural products, rendered 
 it possible for a mere failure of the potato-crop to cause death 
 to three-quarters of a million persons. These things do not 
 happen in properly governed, in other words in self -governed, 
 countries, whatever their fiscal system, and they have never 
 happened to Irishmen in any other part of the world but in 
 their own fertile island. Manufacturing industries stand on 
 a different footing. Most of the staple industries of Ireland, 
 notably the woollen industry, and the aptitudes which brought 
 them into being, were deliberately destroyed long ago by 
 fiscal measures imposed by England, and their destruction 
 aggravated the misery and exhaustion produced by a bad 
 land system. How far their partial revival under the fiscal 
 Home Rule of Grattan's Parliament was genuine, and might, 
 with a continuance of fiscal Home Rule, have been permanent, 
 it is impossible to say. The retarding effect of the Rebellion, 
 and the long start already obtained by Great Britain in the 
 industrial race, are factors beyond accurate calculation. But 
 one thing is certain, that the revival of industries was, at that 
 stage, of trivial importance beside the rural regeneration of 
 Ireland, and that Grattan's Parliament had not the remotest 
 influence for good upon the land question, which it neglected 
 as heartlessly as its predecessors for a century before and its 
 successors for seventy years afterwards.* 
 
 Industries are valuable assets for any country ; but countries 
 * On Foster's Corn Law of 1784, see p. 51.
 
 UNION FINANCE 237 
 
 almost wholly agricultural, like Denmark, can prosper re- 
 markably, and without Protection, provided that they possess 
 or evolve a sound system of agrarian tenure, in other words, 
 a sound relation between tenant and landlord, or, in default 
 of that, peasant ownership. In every country in the world 
 that has been a sine qua non of prosperity. Suppose that 
 English labourers had built out of their own money and by 
 their own hands the factories, docks, and railways in which 
 they worked, and that the resulting profits, wages deducted, 
 went solely to ground landlords. That gives us some idea of 
 the old Irish land system, whose overthrowal began only in 
 1870 ; a system under which the landlord put no capital into 
 the land, though his rent represented the full profits of the 
 tenant's capital and labour, less an amount equivalent to a 
 bare subsistence wage, governed by competition. 
 
 The present influence upon Ireland of the Imperial fiscal 
 system, now that peasant proprietorship has been half accom- 
 plished, is another matter upon which I shall have to say more 
 presently, when we have completed our review of Anglo- 
 Irish finance. Let us return to the point we had reached : that 
 free trade with the outside world and the equalization of 
 taxation between Great Britain and Ireland approximately 
 coincided in point of time, and were also contemporaneous 
 with rapid and continuous growth in the wealth and popula- 
 tion of Great Britain, and a steady and continuous decline in 
 the Irish population. We know now, moreover, though 
 nobody knew it then, because the calculation was not yet 
 made, that Ireland was paying a large contribution to Imperial 
 services, over and above her local expenditure. In the half- 
 century between 1810 and 1860 she had paid an average 
 yearly sum of nearly four millions, and a total sum of nearly 
 two hundred millions. In the year 1859-60, when the now 
 equalized spirit duties were raised to 10s., she paid 5,396,000 ; 
 a sum considerably more than double the expenditure on Irish 
 services, and equivalent to no less than five-sevenths of the 
 revenue raised in Ireland. 
 
 Parliament gave no serious attention to any of these pheno- 
 mena from the time of the fiscal union in 1817 until after the 
 introduction of Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill in 
 1893. No settled conclusions were arrived at as to the relative
 
 238 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 wealth of the two countries, as to the capacity of Ireland to 
 bear the British scale of taxation, or even as to the amount 
 of revenue derived from and expended in the countries re- 
 spectively, with the consequent contributions made to common 
 Imperial services. A Committee sat in 1864-65, which com- 
 piled some interesting information and heard some important 
 witnesses, but ignored the main questions at issue and pro- 
 duced what Sir Edward Hamilton described later as an 
 '' impotent " Report. Sir Joseph MacKenna, an able Irish 
 banker, again and again, between 1867 and 1876, pleaded 
 for an inquiry into Anglo-Irish finance, alleging gross injustice 
 in the incidence of Irish taxation, and obtained nothing more 
 than a rough return showing that between 1841 and 1871 
 the gross tax revenue per head of the population had risen in 
 Ireland from 9s. 6-7d. to 1 6s. 2-2d. and had fallen in Great 
 Britain from 2 9s. 9-5d. to 2 4s. l-6d. For the first time 
 also it was shown that the national beverages of England and 
 Ireland, beer and whisky, respectively, were taxed in a ratio 
 unfair to Ireland. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone, in preparing his 
 first Home Rule Bill, had to re-open the question of the relative 
 resources of Ireland and Great Britain for the first time since 
 the Union, because he proposed a fixed annual contribution, 
 unchangeable for thirty years, from Ireland towards the 
 Imperial services. He fixed the contribution at one-fifteenth 
 or approximately half that of two-seventeenths fixed by Pitt in 
 1800, and the new figure was certainly not too low. In 1888 
 the question was again incidentally raised by Mr. Goschen, 
 who apportioned certain equivalent grants towards local taxa- 
 tion in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the proportion of 
 80, 11, 9, apparently on the principle that those were the 
 proportions in which each country respectively contributed to 
 Imperial expenditure. Mr. Gladstone, in preparing the Home 
 Rule Bill of 1893, made investigations which threw additional 
 light on the true amount of revenue derived from Ireland, 
 with allowance made for revenue from dutiable goods taxed 
 in Ireland but consumed in Great Britain, and vice versa, but 
 his financial scheme, as revised in the course of the Session 
 and passed by the House of Commons, evaded the crucial 
 issue by making Ireland's contribution to Imperial services a 
 quota, one-third, of her true annual revenue. This quota,
 
 UNION FINANCE 239 
 
 moreover, was indirectly reduced by temporary subsidies in 
 aid of Irish charges (e.g., for Police) and was estimated, with 
 these deductions, not to exceed at the outset one-fortieth. 
 
 III. 
 THE FINANCIAL RELATIONS COMMISSION OF 1894-1896. 
 
 It was now apparent that, with or without Home Rule, the 
 whole subject needed serious investigation, and in 1894, after 
 the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, a Royal Commission under 
 the Presidency of Mr. Hugh Childers was appointed to consider 
 the " Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland." 
 Their Report deserves careful study, because it contains 
 within it all the essential materials for forming a judgment 
 upon the financial problem of to-day. All that it lacks are 
 the complementary figures of the subsequent seventeen years, 
 and these figures, which I shall presently add, do not affect 
 the conflict of principles, though they throw into more vivid 
 relief than ever the outcome of conflicting principles. 
 
 In composition it was a very strong Commission ; it con- 
 sulted the highest financial authorities in the Kingdom ; it 
 made for two years an exhaustive examination, historical and 
 practical, of the questions submitted to it, and although the 
 members disagreed on some important points, the conclusions 
 upon which they were unanimous cannot be impugned. The 
 terms of reference were : 
 
 "1. Upon what principles of comparison, and by the applica- 
 tion of what specific standards, the relative capacity of Great 
 Britain and Ireland to bear taxation may be most equitably 
 determined. 
 
 " 2. What, so far as can be ascertained, is the true propor- 
 tion, under the principles and specific standards so determined, 
 between the taxable capacity of Great Britain and Ireland. 
 
 " 3. The history of the financial relations between Great 
 Britain and Ireland at and after the Legislative Union, the 
 charge for Irish purposes on the Imperial Exchequer during 
 that period, and the amount of Irish taxation remaining 
 available for contribution to Imperial expenditure ; also
 
 240 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the Imperial expenditure to which it is considered equitable 
 that Ireland should contribute." 
 
 It will be observed that Questions 1 and 2 deal with abstract 
 points, No. 3 (except the last clause) with concrete facts.* 
 
 In their short unanimous Report the Commissioners began 
 by stating that " Great Britain and Ireland must, for the 
 purposes of this inquiry, be considered as separate entities." 
 
 To Question 1 they made no unanimous answer. This 
 was immaterial, because, as a result of numerous tests (assess- 
 ment to estate duties and income-tax, consumption of com- 
 modities, population, etc.) all arrived unanimously at an 
 answer to the next question. 
 
 Answer to Question 2 (and incidentally, as will be seen, to 
 part of Question 3) : " That whilst the tax revenue of Ireland 
 is about one-eleventh of that of Great Britain, the relative 
 taxable capacity of Ireland is very much smaller, and is not 
 estimated by any of us as exceeding one-twentieth." 
 
 The wording of the answer needs to be explained by reference 
 to the text of the Report. 
 
 (a) In saying " tax revenue " the Commissioners meant to 
 exclude non-tax revenue e.g., Post Office receipts, etc. but 
 the Commissioners in their various separate Reports generally 
 employed the figures of total revenue. Taking these as our 
 basis, the Irish revenue then raised would have been nearly 
 one- twelfth instead of one-eleventh of the British revenue. In 
 other words, of the total revenue of the United Kingdom, 
 Ireland paid nearly one-thirteenth, (b) As to the true Irish 
 taxable capacity of "one- twentieth," some confusion arises 
 owing to the use of the phrase by different Commissioners in 
 different senses. Mr. Childers and Sir David Barbour appear 
 to have meant one-twentieth of the United Kingdom's taxable 
 
 * The text of the unanimous conclusions was as follows : 
 
 1. That Great Britain and Ireland must, for the purpose of this inquiry, be 
 considered as separate entities. 
 
 2. That the Act of Union imposed upon Ireland a burden which, as events 
 showed, she was unable to bear. 
 
 3. That the increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 1853 and 1860 
 was not justified by the then existing circumstances. 
 
 4. That identity of rates of taxation does not necessarily involve equality of 
 burden. 
 
 5. That, whilst the actual tax revenue of Ireland is about one-eleventh of 
 that of Great Britain, the relative taxable capacity of Ireland is very much 
 smaller, and is not estimated by any of us as exceeding one-twentieth.
 
 UNION FINANCE 241 
 
 capacity, the others one-twentieth of Great Britain's. In 
 order to be on the conservative side, I shall adopt the former 
 estimate. The discrepancy is not material to the conclusions 
 of the Commissioners, as, for reasons which I need not go into, 
 they agreed that the minimum amount of over-taxation was 
 two millions and three-quarters. 
 
 This was the main outstanding conclusion of the Royal Com- 
 mission. Translated into figures, it showed the following 
 facts : In 1893-94 the total revenue of the United Kingdom 
 from all sources was 96,855,627. Of this sum the revenue 
 contributed by Great Britain from all sources was 89,286,978 ; 
 by Ireland, 7,568,649 that is, between one-eleventh and one- 
 twelfth of the British revenue. 
 
 If Ireland in 1893-94 had paid in proportion to her true 
 taxable capacity of one- twentieth, the maximum arrived at by 
 any member of the Commission, the revenue derived from her 
 would have been 4,842,781. 
 
 In other words, there was held to be an excess payment 
 from Ireland of 2,725,868. 
 
 It was not suggested by any member of the Commission 
 that Ireland, since the Union, had grown richer at a more 
 rapid rate than England, and was therefore more capable of 
 bearing taxation. On the contrary, it was admitted that she 
 had grown, relatively, much poorer. On the most moderate 
 estimate, therefore, the over-taxation of Ireland since the 
 Union, computed strictly on the principle laid down, could be 
 represented as amounting in 1894 to something like two 
 hundred and fifty millions, or, if we date from the fiscal 
 union of 1817, two hundred millions. 
 
 The answer given by the Commissioners to Question 3, so 
 far as it goes, is explanatory of the previous answer. 
 
 " That the Act of Union imposed upon Ireland a burden 
 which, as events showed, she was unable to bear. 
 
 " That the increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 
 1853 and 1860 was not justified by the then existing circum- 
 stances." 
 
 And they added the opinion " that identity of rates of taxa- 
 tion does not necessarily involve equality of burden." 
 
 Their answers, so far as they were complete, to the other 
 inquiries contained in Question No. 3 about the tax revenue 
 
 16
 
 242 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of ^Ireland and the net contribution of Ireland in the past to 
 Imperial services, are to be found in figures included in the 
 body of the Report, and these figures formed, of course, the 
 basis of their unanimous conclusion as to the over-taxation of 
 Ireland. 
 
 These figures, to which I have often alluded in this volume, 
 necessitate a short digression, because they and subsequent 
 Returns of the same sort form the only official data upon 
 which to estimate the present financial position of Ireland. 
 
 They were extracted partly from annual Returns originally 
 issued by the Treasury for the Home Rule Bill of 1893, and 
 entitled " Financial Relations (England, Scotland, and Ire- 
 land)," and partly from a new document known as the " Pease " 
 Return, No. 313 of 1894. These Returns, taken together, 
 represented the first serious attempt by the Treasury to con- 
 struct an account covering a period from 1819-20 to 1890-91, 
 and showing (a) the exact revenue derived from Ireland 
 and Great Britain respectively ; (6) the local expenditure in 
 Ireland and Great Britain respectively, as distinguished from 
 Imperial expenditure incurred for the benefit of the whole 
 United Kingdom ; (c) the net contribution of Ireland and 
 Great Britain respectively to this latter expenditure for Imperial 
 services only. 
 
 Since 1894 two regular annual Returns have been compiled, 
 the one showing the revenue, local expenditure, and net Im- 
 perial contribution of Scotland, Ireland, and England (in- 
 cluding Wales), the other giving an historical summary of 
 similar figures for Great Britain and Ireland only, from 
 1819-20 to the current date. 
 
 Two insoluble problems have had to be grappled with by 
 the Treasury in preparing these Returns : first, to differentiate 
 Imperial expenditure from local expenditure ; second, to arrive 
 at the " true " net revenue of the partners as distinguished 
 from the revenue collected within their respective limits. 
 Both these problems arise whenever an attempt is made to 
 look behind a system of unitary finance into the burdens and 
 contributions of different portions of a united realm, and the 
 latter, though not the former, of the two may arise in just as 
 acute a form if the realm consists of federated States with a 
 common system of Customs and Excise.
 
 UNION FINANCE 243 
 
 With regard to the first problem, it is, of course, easy, in 
 the case of a Federation, to distinguish between central, or 
 Federal, expenditure and local, or State, expenditure, because 
 the functions of the Federal Government and State Governments 
 are delimited in the Constitution, and the separate expenditures 
 form the subject of separate balance-sheets. But in a Union, 
 and above all in a Union to which one part of the realm is an 
 unwilling party, like that of the British Isles, it is clear that no 
 absolutely accurate line can be drawn between Imperial and 
 local expenditure. The Army, the Navy, and a number of 
 other things are clearly enough Imperial, but there are many 
 debatable items. For example, Is the upkeep of the Lord- 
 Lieutenant an Irish or an Imperial charge ? Is a loss on 
 Post Office business in Ireland to be charged against Ireland, 
 or should Ireland be credited with a proportion of the profits 
 of the whole postal business of the United Kingdom ? More 
 searching questions still : Is the enormous charge for the 
 Irish Police, which is under Imperial control, and exists avow- 
 edly for the purpose of forcibly maintaining, in the Imperial 
 interest, an unpopular form of government in Ireland, to be 
 charged against Ireland ? Or, again, should Ireland be debited 
 with the cost of the machinery for carrying out Land Purchase, 
 a policy admittedly rendered necessary by the enforced main- 
 tenance in the past of bad land laws ? Obviously such ques- 
 tions can never be answered so as to satisfy both Irishmen and 
 Englishmen, because they go to the root of the political rela- 
 tions between Ireland and Great Britain. The Royal Com- 
 mission, therefore, was naturally unable to give a unanimous 
 answer to the last clause of Question No. 3 of their Terms of 
 Reference namely, " What is the Imperial expenditure to 
 which Ireland should equitably contribute ?" Some members 
 held that under the Union even a theoretical classification was 
 unjustifiable, while it was obvious that under the Union no 
 effect could be given to it. Still, the classification had to be 
 made, in order to arrive at a theoretical estimate of the financial 
 situations of Great Britain and Ireland respectively, and the 
 Treasury, charged with the preparation of this estimate, took 
 the only course open to it in reckoning as Irish expenditure all 
 expenditure which would not have to be incurred if Ireland 
 did not exist. It was the perfectly correct course for the
 
 244 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Treasury to take in dealing with the task set before them, 
 and, as we shall see, it provides the only basis on which to 
 construct the balance-sheet of a financially independent Ire- 
 land. 
 
 The insolubility of the second problem that of discovering 
 the " true " revenue of Ireland and Great Britain respectively 
 arises from the difficulty of tracing the passage of dutiable 
 articles from one part of the kingdom to the other, and of 
 tracing the incidence of direct imposts such as income-tax and 
 stamps. The great bulk of Irish revenue is derived from 
 indirect taxes on commodities, liquor, tobacco, tea, sugar, etc. 
 Since the consumer pays the tax, revenue is rightly credited 
 to the country of consumption. The tax, for example, on 
 tobacco manufactured in Ireland may be collected in Ireland, 
 but the revenue from Irish-made tobacco exported to and 
 consumed in Great Britain is rightly credited to Great Britain. 
 The converse holds true. Half the tea consumed in Ireland 
 has paid duty in London, but the whole of the revenue from 
 tea consumed in Ireland must be credited to Ireland. Now, 
 since 1826, no official records had been kept by the Customs- 
 houses of the transit of goods between Ireland and England, 
 except in the solitary case of spirits. The data, therefore, did 
 not exist, and do not exist now, except in the case of spirits, 
 for an accurate computation. This is frankly confessed by 
 the Treasury officials. They base their published figures on 
 certain arbitrary methods of calculation which have never 
 been submitted to any public inquiry, and which, as they admit, 
 contain an element of guesswork. The matter is an exceed- 
 ingly important one to Ireland, because ever since 1870 an 
 increasingly heavy deduction has been made by the Treasury 
 from her " collected " revenue, and her " true " revenue has 
 proportionately diminished. Part of this deduction is no 
 doubt due to the fact that her exports of tobacco and liquor 
 have, in recent times, much exceeded her imports, but the 
 margin for error is nevertheless large. Mr. Gladstone, in 
 framing his Home Rule Bill of 1886, was so sensible of the 
 inherent difficulties of the calculation that, while retaining 
 Customs and Excise under Imperial control, he credited to 
 the Irish Exchequer the whole of the revenue collected within 
 Ireland. On the balance of Anglo-Irish exchange in dutiable
 
 UNION FINANCE 245 
 
 articles, as roughly estimated at that time, this provision meant 
 an annual allowance to Ireland of nearly a million and a half 
 pounds, the principal reason being that Ireland, which is a 
 larger manufacturer of spirits and tobacco, was exporting 
 more than she consumed of these commodities. In the Bill 
 of 1893, as part of a wholly different financial scheme, Mr. 
 Gladstone abandoned the plan just described, and provided 
 for the annual calculation of " true " Irish revenue, as dis- 
 tinguished from " collected " revenue ; but it is a proof of the 
 obscurity and intricacy of the whole business that the Treasury 
 officials made a mistake of 400,000 in the initial calculation, 
 with the result that Mr. Gladstone had to recast his financial 
 scheme from top to bottom. 
 
 In the Return of 1894, as presented to the Royal Commission, 
 this error was eliminated, but the method of calculation re- 
 mained imperfect. Nobody knows now what the true figures 
 are, and there is good reason to think that Irish revenue has 
 always been, and still is, substantially underestimated. 
 
 The same obscurity shrouded, and still shrouds, the " true " 
 Irish revenue from income-tax and stamps, whose proceeds 
 it is exceedingly difficult to trace under a system of unitary 
 finance, and which are traced by the Treasury in a fashion again 
 admittedly unreliable.* 
 
 In regard to taxes on consumption the same difficulty has 
 been met with in Australia since the federation of the Colonies 
 and the delegation to the Commonwealth Government of 
 exclusive control over Customs and Excise. The product of 
 these duties makes up the bulk of Australian revenue, and is 
 far too large for the needs of the Commonwealth Government. 
 The Constitution of 1900 provided that the surplus should be 
 returned to the individual States in proportion to their " true " 
 contributions to the revenue, and for the calculation of these 
 " true " contributions an elaborate system of book-keeping 
 was instituted, in order to trace the ultimate place of con- 
 sumption of dutiable articles. Each State was then credited 
 with its " true " revenue, and debited, among other things, 
 with a proportionate share of the expense of any Department 
 transferred by the Constitution from the State to the Common- 
 
 * Detailed criticism of the current Treasury accounts under this head will 
 be found on pp. 276-278.
 
 246 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 wealth. The system caused general dissatisfaction, owing, as 
 the Australian Official Year Book puts it, " to the practical 
 impossibility of ensuring that in every case a consuming State 
 will be duly credited with revenue collected on its behalf in a 
 distributing State." That is the well-founded complaint of 
 Ireland in regard to the Treasury returns. Hitherto hi Aus- 
 tralia efforts to change the system for another allocating the 
 surplus on a basis of population have not been successful.* 
 The Canadian Federal Constitution uses the basis of population 
 for the distribution of small subsidies to the Provinces, but 
 complaints have arisen as to its fairness. British Columbia, 
 for example, for a long time complained that her subsidy was 
 too small, one of the grounds being that her consumption of 
 dutiable goods was unusually large. No means existed of 
 verifying this complaint by figures. f 
 
 With this explanatory digression about a very important 
 feature of Anglo-Irish finance, I return to the findings of the 
 Royal Commission of 1894-1896. The figures supplied to them 
 were as shown on the opposite page. 
 
 It will be noticed that the average " true " revenue of Ireland 
 was stationary at a little over five millions from 1820 to 1850, 
 rose with a bound to seven and a half millions with the equaliza- 
 tion of taxes in the decade 1850-1860, and remained stationary 
 
 * A referendum taken on April 13, 1910, defeated the new proposals. See 
 " Keport of Premiers' Conference held at Brisbane, May, 1907" (Common- 
 wealth Parliamentary Sessional Paper, No. 13, 1907), and for a clear state- 
 ment of the whole subject, the "Year-Book (1911) of the Commonwealth of 
 Australia." (The relevant clauses of the Constitutional Act are Nos. 88 
 to 93.) The reasons for the failure of the system were summarized as 
 follows : 
 
 "1. The trouble and expense which the necessary record entails. 
 
 " 2. The practical impossibility of ensuring that in every case a consuming 
 State will be duly credited with revenue collected on its behalf in a distributing 
 State. 
 
 " 3. The difficulty involved in equitably determining the amount to be 
 debited to the several States in respect of general Commonwealth expenses. 
 
 "4. The uncertainty on the part of the State Governments as to the 
 amount which will become available. 
 
 " 5. The impossibility of securing independent State and Commonwealth 
 finance." 
 
 See also pp. 295-299. 
 
 f See Proceedings of the Conference of Provincial Premiers, 1906, at 
 Ottawa (Canadian Sessional Papers, vol. xl.), especially McBride's Memo- 
 randum for British Columbia. Numerous other grounds for special treatment 
 were alleged e.g., abnormal cost of civil government, due to vast extent of 
 Province.
 
 UNION FINANCE 
 
 247 
 
 at that figure for the remaining thirty-four years. Expenditure 
 in Ireland quadrupled in the whole sixty-four years ; and the 
 net contribution to Imperial services, after rising from three 
 and a half millions (in round numbers) in 1820 to five and a 
 half millions in 1860, fell automatically, as the expenditure rose, 
 and had stood at two millions from 1890 afterwards. Popula- 
 tion had fallen by two millions, but the " true " revenue 
 raised per head of population rose from 15s. 5d. in 1819 to 
 1 13s. 5d. in 1894, while the local expenditure rose from 
 4s. 7d. per head in 1820 to 1 5s. in 1894. 
 
 STATBMBNT SHOWING THE ESTIMATED LOCAL EXPENDITURE INCURRED IN 
 IRELAND, AND THE BALANCE OF TRUB REVENUE WHICH is AVAILABLE 
 FOR IMPERIAL SERVICES AFTER SUCH EXPENDITURE HAS BEEN MET : 
 
 
 Revenue as 
 
 Adjustment 
 
 Estimated 
 True 
 
 Estimated 
 Locil 
 
 Balance 
 available 
 
 tfW 
 
 Popula- 
 
 
 collected. 
 
 (+)or -). 
 
 Revenue. 
 
 Expendi- 
 ture. 
 
 lor 
 Imperial 
 Services. 
 
 tion. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 [ 1819-20 
 
 5,253,909 
 
 + 2,655 
 
 5,256,564 
 
 1,564,880 
 
 3,691,684 
 
 6,801,000 
 
 1829-30 
 
 4,461,217 
 
 + 1,040,908 
 
 5,502,125 
 
 1,345,549 
 
 4,156,576 
 
 7,767,401 
 
 > 1839-40 
 
 4,574,150 
 
 + 841,739 
 
 5,415,889 
 
 1,789,567 
 
 3,626,322 
 
 8,175,124 
 
 1849-50 
 
 4,338,091 
 
 + 523,374 
 
 4,861,465 
 
 2,247,687 
 
 2,613,778 
 
 6,574,278 
 
 "3 | 1859-60 
 
 7,097,994 
 
 + 602,430 
 
 7,700,334 
 
 2,304,334 
 
 5,396,000 
 
 5,798,967 
 
 H 1869-70 
 
 7,331,058 
 
 + 95,274 
 
 7,426,332 
 
 2,938,122 
 
 4,488,210 
 
 5,412,377 
 
 1879-80 
 
 7,831,316 
 
 - 550,520 
 
 7,280,856 
 
 4,054.549 
 
 3,226,307 
 
 5,174,836 
 
 Q V 1889-90 
 
 9,005,932 
 
 - 1,271,254 
 
 7,734,678 
 
 5,057,708 
 
 2,676,970 
 
 4,704,750 
 
 -3 / 1890-91 
 
 9,301,463 
 
 - 1,506,988 
 
 7,794,475 
 
 5,723,399 
 
 2,071,076 
 
 
 
 a 1 1891-92 
 
 9,639,331 
 
 - 1,671,226 
 
 7,968,105 
 
 6,021,810 
 
 1,946,295 
 
 
 
 g g. 1 1892-93 
 
 9,425,177 
 
 - 1,986,780 
 
 7,438,397 
 
 5,540,508 
 
 1,897,889 
 
 
 
 l<a 1893-94 
 
 9,650,649 
 
 - 2,082,000 
 
 7,568,649 
 
 5,602,555 
 
 1,966,094 
 
 4,638,000 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^estimated; 
 
 In 1893-94, the last year under review, Ireland, hi round 
 figures, was producing a net revenue of seven and a half 
 millions, was costing five and a half millions, and was, therefore, 
 contributing to Imperial services a surplus of two millions. 
 In the same year, while contributing her two millions, she 
 was overtaxed, according to the lowest estimate of the Com- 
 missioners, by two and three-quarter millions. 
 
 But the significance of these figures cannot be discerned 
 without an examination of their counterparts on the British 
 side of the account. In the whole period Great Britain's 
 "true" revenue had risen from 51,445,764 to 89,286,978; 
 her local expenditure from 4,439,333 to 30,618,586, and her 
 net contribution to Imperial services from 47,006,431 to
 
 248 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 58,668,392. Her population had increased from 13,765,000 
 in 1820 to 33,469,000 (estimated) in 1893, but her "true" 
 revenue had fallen per head of the population from 3 13s. to 
 2 13s. 4d. (approximately), although her local expenditure had 
 risen from 4s. 7d. to 1 2s. (approximately). In other words, a 
 great increase of wealth had enabled the British taxpayer to 
 pay far more while feeling the burden far less. The converse 
 was true of Ireland. 
 The current state of the account in 1893-94 was as follows : 
 
 
 Great Britain 
 
 Ireland 
 
 
 1893-94. 
 
 (Population, 
 
 (Population, 
 
 Totals. 
 
 
 33,469,000). 
 
 4,638,000). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 " True" Revenue 
 
 89,286,978 
 
 7,568,649 
 
 96,855,627 
 
 Local Expenditure ... 
 
 30,618,586 
 
 5,602,555 
 
 36,221,141 
 
 Net contribution to Imperial 
 
 
 
 
 Services 
 
 58,668,392 
 
 1,966,094 
 
 60,634,486 
 
 Great Britain, though raising in " true " revenue between 
 eleven and twelve times as much as Ireland, was costing only 
 between five and six times as much to administer as Ireland, 
 and was therefore contributing to Imperial services twenty- 
 eight times as much as Ireland. 
 
 Now the Commissioners had stated that the taxable capacity 
 of Ireland was not one-eleventh, but, at the utmost, one- 
 twentieth in other words, that she ought to contribute not 
 more than one-twentieth of the United Kingdom revenue. On 
 that basis she should as we have seen, have been showing a 
 revenue in 1893-94 not of 7,568,649, but of 4,842,781. 
 
 But, if her local expenditure had also been proportionate 
 to her true taxable capacity of one-twentieth, instead of 
 standing at 5,602,555, it would have stood at 1,811,057, 
 or two-thirds less, while if her net contribution to Imperial 
 services had likewise been a twentieth, instead of paying 
 1,966,094, she would have had to pay 3,031,724, or a 
 million more. 
 
 The conclusion, therefore, might be extracted from the 
 figures that, although by hypothesis overtaxed, Ireland was 
 drawing a balance of profit, because, by having more spent 
 on her or, to put it in another way, by costing more to
 
 UNION FINANCE 249 
 
 govern, she paid a million less to the common purse than if 
 she had been taxed according to her capacity. 
 
 This was precisely the conclusion drawn by one member of 
 the Commission, Sir David Barbour, and implicitly acquiesced 
 in by one other member, Sir Thomas Sutherland. All the 
 other Commissioners agreed that there was something seriously 
 amiss, and declined to regard the disproportionately high 
 expenditure on Ireland as compensation for the over-high 
 taxation. The 'Con or Don, as successor in the chairmanship 
 to Mr. Childers, and four others contented themselves with 
 setting forth the facts, but made no recommendations, on the 
 ground that the Commission had not been asked to make any. 
 Mr. Childers, who died before the completion of the inquiry, 
 left a Draft Report recommending that a special grant, amount- 
 ing to two millions a year, should for the future be allocated 
 to Ireland. The other six members, dividing into two groups 
 of three, under Lord Farrer and Mr. Sexton respectively, and 
 stating their views in two different Reports, all agreed that a 
 form of Home Rule giving financial independence to Ireland 
 was the only solution of the difficulty. 
 
 The questions at issue were not at all obscure. Any ap- 
 parent obscurity was caused by the terms of reference to the 
 Commission, which assumed the permanence of the Union, 
 while it was absolutely impossible for the Commission, divided 
 though its members were in politics, to start work at all 
 without, as they said, considering Great Britain and Ireland 
 as " separate entities." The reader must be on his guard 
 against exaggerating the "over-taxation of Ireland" in its 
 purely cash aspect. The really important points were : ( 1) The 
 suitability of the Irish taxes and the responsibility for levying 
 them ; (2) the amount and suitability of the expenditure in 
 Ireland and the responsibility for its distribution. In order 
 to see conflicting principles stated in their clearest form 
 the reader should compare the terse and vigorous reports 
 of Sir David Barbour on the one hand, and of Lord Farrer, 
 Lord Welby, and Mr. Currie on the other. 
 
 It was Sir David Barbour's great merit that he was not 
 afraid of his own conclusions. He frankly stated, like all the 
 other Commissioners, that Ireland's taxation, considered by 
 itself, without regard to Irish expenditure, was unsuitable and
 
 250 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 unjust. He recognized that a system of taxation which was 
 suitable for a rich, industrial, and expanding country like 
 Great Britain was unsuitable for a poor, agricultural, and 
 economically stagnant country like Ireland. He had before 
 him the figures showing that two-thirds of the Irish population 
 was rural, and that between three and four-fifths of the English 
 population was urban.* He laid special stress on the fact 
 that five-sevenths of Irish revenue, as compared with less 
 than half the British revenue, was derived from taxes on 
 commodities of general consumption, pressing heavily on the 
 poor, and set forth the figures showing that the product of 
 these taxes represented a charge of 1 2s. -95d. per head of the 
 population in Ireland, and 1 Is. -05d. in Great Britain, although 
 the wealth per head of Great Britain, as he admitted, " was 
 much greater than the wealth of Ireland per head."| His 
 conclusion was that this state of affairs, though regrettable, 
 could not be helped, because, under the Union, whose perman- 
 ence he took for granted, a change of general taxation to suit 
 Ireland was simply impracticable. He did, it is true, point out 
 incidentally that the same hardship might be said to affect 
 poor localities in Great Britain and poor individuals in Great 
 Britain, but he recoiled from the absurd fallacy involved in 
 saying that on that account Ireland was not unjustly taxed. 
 If he had gone to that length he could never have signed the 
 unanimous Report. 
 
 I only mention this latter point because some outside critics 
 have been bold enough to assert the faUacy in its completeness, 
 proving, as they easily can, that the purchase of a pound of 
 tea or a pint of beer is as great an expense to a man with 
 10s. a week in Whitechapel as to a man with 10s. a week in 
 Connemara. Such reasoning nullifies the whole science of 
 taxation. It would be as sensible to say that our whole 
 fiscal system might wisely be transplanted in its entirety to 
 any foreign country or to any self-governing Colony absolutely 
 irrespective of their social and economic conditions and of their 
 habits. Yet Ireland in these respects has always differed 
 from Great Britain at least as much as any self-governing 
 Colony and many European countries. The tea-tax produces 
 scarcely anything in France ; it produces an enormous amount 
 
 * Final Report, p. 24 (Census figures of 1891). f Final Eeport, p. 122.
 
 UNION FINANCE 251 
 
 relatively in Ireland, and is a greater burden there than 
 in Great Britain. The wine-tax is not felt by Ireland ; it 
 is felt more by England ; it would cause a revolution in 
 France. Beer is taxed lightly in the United Kingdom, but the 
 Irishman drinks only half as much beer as the Englishman. 
 Meat is un taxed, but the Irish poor eat no meat. Spirits and 
 tobacco are highly taxed, and they are consumed more largely 
 in Ireland than in England. And so on. The whole Com- 
 mission recognized that the circumstances of the two countries 
 were different, and stated " that identity of rates of taxation 
 does not necessarily involve equality of burden." 
 
 Nor could Sir David Barbour have dissociated himself from 
 these conclusions without destroying the rest of his argument. 
 He pointed out with truth that merely to reduce Irish taxa- 
 tion to its correct level, and to leave Irish expenditure where 
 it was, would be to wipe out Ireland's contribution to Imperial 
 purposes and leave her with a subsidy from Great Britain 
 of three-quarters of a million. On the other hand, he held, 
 as I have already indicated, that unduly heavy taxation in 
 Ireland was already compensated for by an excess of local 
 expenditure hi Ireland as compared with Great Britain. But 
 how, on its merits, and apart from the question of taxation, 
 could such an excess be justified ? The Act of Union had 
 provided for indiscriminate expenditure in the event of a 
 fiscal union. Most of the other Commissioners, indeed, had 
 objected to the idea of distinguishing between " Imperial " 
 expenditure and " local " expenditure, and striking a balance 
 called an " Imperial contribution," without, at the same time, 
 distinguishing politically between Ireland and Great Britain. 
 In other words, they took up the not very logical position that 
 Ireland must be considered as a separate entity for purposes 
 of finance owing to the phrase about " abatements and ex- 
 emptions," but not for purposes of expenditure. Whether 
 this was a correct interpretation of the Act of Union has always 
 been a matter of dispute, but the practical problem is little 
 affected thereby. Sir David Barbour thought it an incorrect 
 interpretation, and reached the more logical position that 
 Ireland, both for revenue and expenditure, could be regarded 
 as a separate entity. This view enabled him to put forward an 
 argument which, while ostensibly palliating the over-taxation
 
 252 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of Ireland, in reality condemned the whole of the political 
 system established by the Union. We can, he said, in effect, 
 rightly distinguish between Imperial and local expenditure, 
 and it is permissible to spend more on Ireland than on Great 
 Britain. By so spending more we not only cancel our debt 
 to Ireland, but make her a present of a million which would 
 otherwise go to swell her contribution to Imperial purposes. 
 Now, to get at the pith of this argument, the reader must 
 bear in mind what Sir David Barbour thought it needless to 
 remark upon, that Ireland had, and has, a separate quasi- 
 colonial system of administration of her own, but outside 
 her own control, a system of which he approved. In other 
 words, besides having to be considered in finance as a 
 " separate entity," she was to a large extent in actual fact, 
 politically, a " separate entity," though not a self-governing 
 entity, to which through the channel of the Irish Government 
 Departments a special large quota for local expenditure could 
 be easily allocated. As an economist, therefore, and as an up- 
 holder of the strangely paradoxical system set up by the 
 so-called "Union," Sir David Barbour was absolutely consistent. 
 So were Lord Farrer, Lord Welby, and Mr. Currie in coming 
 to diametrically opposite conclusions. The crux of the dis- 
 cussion, stripped of academical reasoning, was simple. Every- 
 thing turned, obviously, on the nature, amount, and origin 
 of Irish expenditure. Sir David Barbour had passed lightly 
 over these vital points, recommending only that any future 
 saving of expenditure in Ireland ought to be used for Irish pur- 
 poses a further admission of Ireland's separate political 
 existence and shutting his eyes to future increases of ex- 
 penditure. Lord Farrer and his colleagues, while agreeing 
 that it was impossible to alter the taxation of Ireland so long 
 as the Union lasted, agreed that additional local expenditure 
 in Ireland could not be regarded as a set-off to undue taxation, 
 not only because such a doctrine was inherently fallacious on 
 economic grounds, and would hardly be listened to in the case 
 of any other country than Ireland, but because Irish expendi- 
 ture was subjected to no proper means of control. Both 
 Irish revenue and Irish services, the former being only theor- 
 etically, the latter actually, distinct and separate, were outside 
 the control of Irishmen, who had therefore no motive for
 
 UNION FINANCE 253 
 
 economy. Nor was there any proper measure of determining 
 what expenditure was good for Ireland and what was bad, 
 though they held that there was reason to believe that much of 
 Irish administration was both bad and costly. With regard 
 to the extensive system of Imperial loans, whose charge 
 swelled the Irish expenditure, they quoted the unchallenged 
 evidence of Mr. Murrough O'Brien* to the effect that the 
 system of Imperial loans for temporary emergencies and 
 charity loans " made to keep the people quiet or to keep 
 them alive " tends to increase the poverty of Ireland, " does 
 not prevent the recurrence of famine, distress, and discontent," 
 and that " a great deal of the money nominally meant to be 
 spent on productive works has been misspent and wasted." 
 They also dwelt, with emphasis, on official figures showing 
 the extravagance of Civil Government in Ireland, the cost 
 having risen from Is. lOd. per head of the population in 
 1820 to 19s. 7d. per head in 1893, whereas the cost of Civil 
 Government in Great Britain had only risen from Is. 7d. to 
 11s. 5d. The charge for legal salaries and five principal 
 Departments in Ireland was double the right figure according 
 to population, and represented an excess cost of nearly 
 200,000. In wealthy and progressive Belgium, Civil Govern- 
 ment cost 10s. per head, or little more than half as much per 
 head as in Ireland, f The absurdity of representing such 
 excess charges and the wasteful expenditure of a blundering 
 philanthropy, as a recompense for over-taxation, was manifest. 
 
 Meanwhile, the rise in the cost of Irish Government, coupled 
 with a stagnant revenue, had decreased the annual contribu- 
 tion of Ireland to Imperial services, which had fallen from 
 five and a half millions in 1860 to two millions in 1894 ; unless, 
 indeed, half the cost of Irish police, virtually a branch of 
 the Imperial Army, and costing double the amount of Scottish 
 and English police, were to be reckoned, not as an Irish expense, 
 on the principle adopted by the Treasury, but as a part of Im- 
 perial expenditure. In any case both partners suffered from 
 excessive and unwise expenditure in Ireland. 
 
 The gist of their conclusions was as follows :J 
 
 1. It is impossible, under the Union, to vary taxation for 
 the benefit of Ireland. 
 
 * Final Report, p. 50. f Ibid., pp. 48, 49. | Ibid., pp. 51-54,
 
 254 
 
 2. Additional benevolent expenditure in Ireland is not a 
 remedy for over- taxation.* 
 
 " We entertain a profound distrust of benevolences, doles, 
 grants-in-aid, by whatever name they are called, ... or by what- 
 ever machinery it is proposed to distribute them, convinced, 
 as we are, that in some form or other political influence or 
 personal interest will creep in so as to defeat, in part at any 
 rate, the attainment of the objects for which the expenditure 
 is made." 
 
 3. " We believe that the expenditure of public funds cannot 
 be wisely and economically controlled unless those who have 
 the disposal of public money are made responsible for raising 
 it as well as spending it." Grants of money " tend to weaken 
 the spirit of independence and self-reliance," the absence of 
 which qualities " has been the main cause of the backward 
 condition " of Ireland. 
 
 4. " One sure method of redressing the inequality which 
 has been shown to exist between Great Britain and Ireland 
 will be to put upon the Irish people the duty of levying their 
 own taxes and of providing for their own expenditure." 
 
 5. "If it is objected that the course we suggest may lead 
 to the imposition of new Customs duties in Ireland, we might 
 reply that in this case, as in that of the Colonies, freedom is a 
 greater good than free trade. We doubt, however, whether 
 Irishmen, if entrusted with their own finance, would attempt 
 to raise fiscal barriers between the two countries ; for we are 
 satisfied that Ireland, and not Great Britain, would be the loser 
 by such a policy. The market of Great Britain is of infinitely 
 greater importance to Ireland than that of Ireland to Great 
 Britain." The only point on which the three Commissioners 
 differed concerned Ireland's contribution to Imperial services. 
 Lord Farrer and Mr. Currie, taking Home Rule as the founda- 
 tion of their argument, and prophesying, quite correctly, that 
 under the Union, in a few years, Ireland's contribution would 
 disappear altogether, recommended that no such contribution 
 should be exacted by law until Ireland's taxable capacity 
 approximately reached that of Great Britain. Lord Welby, 
 
 * They were at issue here with Mr. Childers, who, in his Draft Report, 
 proposed halving the rates on Irish railways and further endowing the Con- 
 gested Districts Board. But Mr. Childers, though a Home Ruler, felt himself 
 bound by the Terms of Reference not to suggest a Home Rule solution.
 
 UNION FINANCE 255 
 
 regarding Homo Rule as an essential but a distant ideal, was 
 for an immediate reorganization of Anglo-Irish finances which 
 should provide for a large reduction of Irish Civil expenditure, 
 the saving to be devoted, on Sir David Barbour's principle, 
 to Irish purposes, and for a fixed contribution from Ireland 
 to the Army, Navy, National Debt, etc. How Lord Welby, 
 consistently with his previous argument, could count upon any 
 reduction of expenditure in Ireland under the existing political 
 system it is difficult to see. At any rate, subsequent events 
 proved both him and Sir David Barbour signally wrong on this 
 important point.* 
 
 In every other point the wisdom of the three Commissioners 
 has been abundantly proved by lapse of time. Do not the 
 conclusions set forth above bear upon them the stamp of 
 common sense ? If it were not for the inveterate prejudice 
 against Home Rule on other than financial grounds, no one 
 would dream of disputing them ; for they are based on prin- 
 ciples universally accepted in every part of the British Empire 
 but Ireland, and in most parts of the civilized world. They 
 constitute, in fact, financially, one of the strongest arguments 
 possible for political Home Rule. 
 
 There, at any rate, lies a clear issue. Seventeen years have 
 not altered the essential principles involved. On the contrary, 
 it will be seen that every year of the seventeen has strengthened 
 the argument of Lord Farrer and his colleagues, and weakened 
 the argument of Sir David Barbour. But, before proceeding 
 to this final demonstration, let me in general terms describe 
 what befell the Royal Commission's Report, which was published 
 in 1896. For a moment all Ireland, irrespective of class or 
 creed, was alight with patriotic excitement. Few listened to 
 Sir David Barbour's view, namely, that so long as Irish ex- 
 penditure came near Irish revenue there could be no Irish 
 grievance. Home Rulers and Unionists met on friendly plat- 
 forms to denounce the over-taxation of Ireland and to display 
 figures showing the hundreds of millions of profit made by 
 
 * Lord Welby (Final Eeport, p. 54) compared his proposal for Ireland with 
 the system in the Isle of Man, where the proceeds of a tariff distinct from 
 that of Great Britain were devoted in the first instance to the payment of a 
 fixed Imperial contribution and the surplus to local needs. But in the Isle 
 of Man the whole point was that the tariff was a local tariff, chosen by 
 Manxmen to suit themselves, while the administration was under Manx control.
 
 256 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Great Britain out of an unconscionable fiscal bargain. This 
 criticism missed the real point and the unanimity was short- 
 lived. No change could be made in the system without Home 
 Rule, and the dissension about Home Rule was strong enough 
 to prevent Irishmen from uniting against a fiscal system 
 which was not only unjust but demoralizing to Ireland. 
 A Unionist Government was in power for nine more years 
 after 1896, and a Liberal Government, pledged temporarily 
 not to give Home Rule, for four further years. The natural 
 result was that, in default of Home Rule, all parties in Ireland 
 embraced Sir David Barbour's insidiously attractive reser- 
 vation, and have ever since fallen into the habit of regarding 
 additional expenditure on Ireland, not only on its merits, but 
 as a set-off to excessive taxation and as something having no 
 relation whatever to the taxable resources of the country. 
 Nobody took seriously Sir David Barbour's counsel of perfec- 
 tion about the reduction of the cost of Irish Civil Government 
 and the allocation of the saving to Ireland, because such a 
 process was, humanly speaking, impossible. Expenditure is 
 never reduced except by those who raise the money for it. 
 On the other hand, in the face of the findings of the Royal 
 Commission, and in the face of Ireland's economic condition, 
 no Government which refused Home Rule could have refused 
 large additional Irish expenditure. Much of it, indeed, was 
 merely an automatic reflection of the immense growth of 
 national expenditure in the wealthy and expanding partner- 
 country over the water, and took the form of " equivalent 
 grants," whether for the corresponding British head of expense 
 or for something totally different. No doubt some of the 
 money was well spent, but all of it came in a wrong form, 
 through wrong channels, and was regarded in Ireland in a false 
 light. Lastly came Old Age Pensions applied on the British 
 scale to a far poorer population. 
 
 Every word of Lord Welby's and Lord Farrer's condemna- 
 tion was justified by events ; every prophecy they made has 
 been fulfilled. And the worst of it is that the delay has 
 damaged the prospects of Home Rule. The habit of disso- 
 ciating income from revenue becomes inveterate. The habit 
 of nursing an old grievance and of expecting " restitution " 
 for funds unwarrantably levied in the past is hard to shake
 
 UNION FINANCE 257 
 
 off. Restitution has gone too far already. Perpetuated, it 
 would ruin Ireland. Home Rulers worth their salt must leave 
 this cry to those Unionists who descend to use it ; but it is 
 surely amazing that any Irishman, least of all those who claim 
 to represent the wealth and intelligence of the country, should 
 tolerate a political system which inexorably involves a fiscal 
 system so humiliating to Ireland. Until three years ago it 
 could easily have been put an end to without affecting the 
 independent solvency of Ireland, even on the basis of an enor- 
 mously swollen civil expenditure, and with the inclusion of 
 services strictly Imperial in origin and character. Now it 
 is a different matter, and we are faced with the opposition of 
 British statesmen who, by sustaining the Union, drove Ireland 
 to the verge of insolvency, and now use insolvency as an argu- 
 ment against Home Rule. 
 
 One respects the clean and honest side of Unionism, but 
 there can be nothing but reprobation for the meanness of this 
 latter-day argument. For generations Ireland herself has 
 asked to be free both from coercion and bribes, sanely conscious 
 in her soul that both are equally demoralizing. The aim 
 though in the past not generally the conscious aim of Unionism 
 was to sap the moral fibre of Ireland now by one means, now 
 by the other. At last the aim is avowed, so that men who 
 applauded Mr. Chamberlain in 1893 for sneering at Irish 
 patriotism as a " sickly plant which needed to be watered by 
 British gold " merely because her contribution under the 
 Home Rule Bill was to be small are now urging Ireland to 
 maintain the Union in Mr. Walter Long's words for its 
 "eleemosynary benefits."* Ireland herself must and will rise 
 to a higher moral level than that, when she is fully awake to the 
 gravity of the situation. Those who love her most will not lose 
 a minute in explaining that situation. Too much time already 
 has been lost. 
 
 * Letter to the Belfast Telegraph, October 7, 1911. 
 
 17
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 
 
 I. 
 ANGLO-IRISH FINANCE TO-DAY. 
 
 THE finances of Ireland since the Union, when reviewed by 
 the Royal Commission in 1894-1896, exhibited five principal 
 features : 
 
 1. A declining population. 
 
 2. An estimated true taxable capacity falling as compared 
 with that of Great Britain, and standing in 1893-94 at a maxi- 
 mum of 1 to 19. 
 
 3. A revenue stationary for thirty-four years, and showing 
 in 1893-94 a ratio of 1 to 12 with that of Great Britain. 
 
 4. A growing local expenditure (though stationary for the 
 last four years). 
 
 5. A dwindling net contribution to Imperial services (though 
 stationary for the last four years). 
 
 If we review the subsequent seventeen years, we find : 
 
 1. A population still declining, though at a slower rate. 
 
 2. An estimated true taxable capacity still falling as com- 
 pared with that of Great Britain, and now standing at a maxi- 
 mum of 1 to 24.* That is, Ireland ought strictly to be paying 
 no more than one-twenty-fifth of the United Kingdom revenue. 
 
 3. A revenue rising, but very slowly and inelastically as 
 compared with that of Great Britain, and now showing a ratio 
 of 1 to 15 ; so that the " over- taxation " of Ireland, as reckoned 
 
 * I.e., on the generally accepted basis of (1) assessment to death duties, 
 (2) assessment to income-tax. With regard to (1), in the last report of the 
 Inland Revenue Commissioners, the figure for the United Kingdom was 
 371,808,534; for Ireland, 15,872,302, or ? ^ T . With regard to (2), the 
 figure for the United Kingdom was 1009'9 millions ; for Ireland, 39'7 millions, 
 or - a -i.-j. Deduct a small allowance for the difference between resources and 
 taxable capacity, and the result approximately is one- twenty-fifth. 
 
 258
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 259 
 
 on the Royal Commission's principles, is still at least three 
 millions.* 
 
 4. A local expenditure growing rapidly and disproportion- 
 ately to Irish revenue ; now just double the expenditure of 
 1893-94. 
 
 5. A net contribution to Imperial services automatically 
 diminishing with the growth of Irish expenditure, disappearing 
 altogether in 1909-10, and now converted into an adverse 
 balance against Ireland of 1,312,500. 
 
 In Great Britain during the same seventeen years, population, 
 taxable capacity, revenue, expenditure, and net contribution 
 to Imperial services have all grown steadily, and, what is more 
 important, in healthy proportions to one another. 
 
 On the next page will be found the comparative figures for 
 Ireland and Great Britain of revenue, expenditure, and con- 
 tribution for 1893-94 and 1910-11. 
 
 Let me remark at the outset (a) that they and other official 
 figures given in this chapter are taken from the annual Treasury 
 returns alluded to at p. 242, " Revenue and Expenditure 
 (England, Scotland, and Ireland) " and " Imperial Revenue 
 (Collection and Expenditure) (Great Britain and Ireland)." 
 For the current year 1910-11 the official numbers of these 
 Returns are 220 and 221, and the latter of the two is virtually 
 a continuation of the original return, No. 313 of 1894 ; (b) that 
 the non-collection of a large part of the revenue of 1909-10, 
 owing to the delay in passing the Budget, makes the revenue 
 figures of the last two years, regarded in isolation, misleading^ 
 those of the first year being abnormally low, those of the last 
 abnormally high. I therefore give the mean figures of the 
 two years. Expenditure is, of course, unaffected, (c) That 
 
 * Total revenue (including non-tax revenue) of United 
 
 Kingdom (mean of two years, 1909-10, 1910-11) ... 165,147,500 
 
 One-twenty-fifth 6,605,900 
 
 Actual " true" revenue contributed by Ireland (mean 
 
 of two years, 1909-10, 1910-11) 10,032,000 
 
 "Over-taxation" 3,426,100 
 
 If only the tax-revenue be taken, the over-taxation amounts to 3,109,800 
 (total revenue for United Kingdom, 140,680,000; one- twenty -fifth= 
 5,627,200; actual Irish revenue, 8,737,000). Some members of the Eoyal 
 Commission made certain allowances for education grants, etc., which it would 
 be useless to parallel now.
 
 260 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 the Irish revenue shown as " true " is reduced by heavy deduc- 
 tions from the revenue as actually collected in Ireland. At 
 p. 244 I explained that this adjustment can be regarded only 
 as approximately correct, owing to the admittedly unreliable 
 methods adopted by the Treasury, (d) That the revenue 
 shown includes non-tax as well as tax revenue. 
 
 
 Ireland. 
 
 Great Britain. 
 
 1893-94. 
 
 1910-11. 
 
 1893-94. 
 
 1910-11. 
 
 Population 
 
 4,638,000 
 
 4,381,951 
 
 33,469,000 
 (estimated) 
 
 40,834,790 
 
 " Collected " re- 
 venue (in- 
 cluding non- 
 tax revenue) 
 
 9,650,649 
 
 11,704,500 
 (mean of two 
 years, 1910- 
 11, 1909-10) 
 
 88,728,428 
 
 156,574,250 
 (mean of two 
 years, 1910- 
 11, 1909-10) 
 
 " True " revenue 
 (including 
 non - tax re- 
 venue) 
 
 7,568,649 
 
 10,032,000 
 (mean of itwo 
 years, 1910- 
 11, 1909-10) 
 
 89,286,978 
 
 155,137,250 
 (mean of two 
 years, 1910- 
 11,1909-10) 
 
 Local Expendi- 
 ture 
 
 5,602,555 
 
 11,344,500 
 
 30,618,586 
 
 60,544,000 
 
 Contribution to 
 Imperial Ser- 
 vices 
 
 1,966,094 
 
 Nil (Local Ex- 
 penditure in 
 excess of 
 
 58,668,392 
 
 94,593,250 
 
 
 
 " true " re- 
 
 
 
 
 
 venue (as 
 averaged for 
 years, 1910- 
 11, 1909-10): 
 1,312,500 
 
 
 
 Irish expenditure has been rapidly overtaking Irish revenue 
 during the last three years. In 1907-08 there was a balance 
 available for Imperial services of 1,811,000; in 1908-09, of 
 only 583,000 ; and in 1910-11, on the basis of a mean of 
 that and the previous year, the deficit shown above of 
 1,312,500. The principal cause is the Old Age Pensions 
 Vote, which began in 1908. 
 
 If all the elements of the problem be considered together, it 
 will be seen that the fiscal partnership is as ill-matched as ever, 
 and has produced results increasingly anomalous. Each of 
 the partners and their united interests suffer. Ireland is still 
 more heavily taxed relatively to Great Britain, yet Ireland's
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 
 
 261 
 
 contribution to Imperial services has been converted into a 
 minus quantity. Why ? Because Irish expenditure, paid out 
 of the common purse, has doubled, while Irish revenue has 
 increased by less than a third. 
 
 Let me give the final survey of Anglo-Irish finance since the 
 Union, in the tabular form shown by Professor Oldham at the 
 meeting of the British Association in September, 1911 : 
 
 NBT BALANCES PAID BY IRELAND TO GREAT BRITAIN. 
 
 Single 
 Year. 
 
 Irish "True" 
 Revenue. 
 
 Expenditure 
 in Ireland. 
 
 Balance 
 One Year. 
 
 Decadal 
 Balance. 
 
 1819-20 
 
 1829-30 
 1839-40 
 1849-50 
 1859-60 
 1869-70 
 1879-80 
 1889-90 
 1899-1900 
 
 Net Balances 
 
 
 5,256,564 
 5,502,125 
 5,415,889 
 4,861,465 
 7,700,334 
 7,426,332 
 7,280,856 
 7,734,678 
 8,664,500 
 
 Averag 
 Add, A 
 
 Ne 
 Deduct 
 
 Ne 
 Add, A 
 
 paid by Irelanc 
 
 
 1,564,880 
 1,345,549 
 1,789,567 
 2,247,687 
 2,304,334 
 2,938,122 
 4,054,549 
 5,057,708 
 6,980,000 
 
 ed Balances for 
 Jtual Balances, 
 
 t Payments, in 
 Drawings, defi 
 
 t Payments, in 
 3tual Balance, ! 
 
 I to Great Brits 
 
 
 3,691,684 
 4,156,576 
 3,626,322 
 2,613,778 
 5,396,000 
 4,488,210 
 3,226,307 
 2,676,970 
 1,684,500 
 
 90 years ... 
 1900-09 ... 
 
 99 years ... 
 cit of 1909-10 
 
 100 years ... 
 1910-11 
 
 iin, 1809-1911 
 
 
 36,916,840 
 41,565,760 
 36,263,220 
 26,137,780 
 53,960,000 
 44,882,100 
 32,263,070 
 26,769,700 
 16,845,000 
 
 315,603,470 
 16,214,000 
 
 331,817,470 
 2,357,500 
 
 329,459,970 
 321,000 
 
 329,780,970 
 
 
 What has become of Sir David Barbour's argument in favour 
 of the existing fiscal system ? He admitted that Ireland 
 was overtaxed by two millions and three-quarters. But he 
 showed, it will be remembered, that if not only the revenue, 
 but the expenditure and contribution to Imperial services 
 had all been in proportion to Ireland's real taxable capacity 
 of one-twentieth, she would have been a loser by a million.* 
 Ireland, therefore, he argued, had certainly no grievance, 
 while Great Britain received the substantial, though not 
 strictly sufficient, sum of two millions as Ireland's contribution 
 to Imperial expenses. 
 
 Let us apply the same reasoning to the present situation. 
 
 * See pp. 248-249.
 
 262 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Ireland, by hypothesis, is " overtaxed " by three millions,* but 
 if not only the revenue, but the expenditure and contribution 
 to Imperial services of Ireland were all in proportion to her 
 real taxable capacity, which we may estimate now at one- 
 twenty-fifth, we find that she would be a loser by five millions. 
 Her " true " revenue from all sources ought on this supposi- 
 tion to be 6,605,900 ; it is 10,032,000. Her local expenditure 
 ought to be 2,875,540; it is 11,344,500. Her contribution 
 to Imperial services ought to be 3,730,360 ; it is a minus 
 quantity of 1,312,500. Sir David Barbour's reasoning, then, 
 leads us to this astounding paradox, that Ireland, while over- 
 taxed by three millions, gains five millions by the arrange- 
 ment. Moreover, whether we accept Sir David Barbour's 
 reasoning or not, it is a fact that to-day Ireland, which con- 
 tributed to Imperial services five and a half millions in 1860, 
 and two millions in 1894, now, so far from contributing anything, 
 costs a million and a quarter more than she brings in. This, 
 certainly, was not a result he either anticipated or would have 
 approved of. On the contrary, he anticipated a reduction in 
 Irish civil expenditure, to be saved for Irish purposes, without 
 prejudice to the Imperial contribution. It makes the brain 
 dizzy to compare his anticipation with the reality. 
 
 How, on the other hand, stands the argument of Lord 
 Farrer and Mr. Currie ? They prophesied a great increase in 
 Irish expenditure and the disappearance of the contribution 
 to Imperial services. That has come true. Lord Welby (and 
 indeed the majority of the Commission) was with them in de- 
 clining to regard excessive local expenditure as a set-off to 
 excessive and unsuitable taxation, and in condemning root 
 and branch the system of grants, aids, and doles as wasteful 
 in itself and as sapping the self-reliance of Irishmen. There 
 again they were right. They were at one with all their col- 
 leagues in holding that under the Union it was impossible to 
 differentiate between the taxation of Ireland and Great Britain, 
 and they prescribed, as the only sound remedy, Home Rule. 
 Once more they were right. 
 
 The figures of to-day constitute the reductio ad absurdum 
 of the Union. For over a century in Ireland we have defied 
 the laws of political economy, but they have conquered us 
 
 * See p. 259, footnote.
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 263 
 
 at last. Sound finance demands that revenue and expenditure 
 should be co-related. Ireland's economic circumstances are 
 widely different from those of Great Britain, but she has been 
 included, without any regard to her needs and without any 
 reference to Irish expenditure, in a system of taxation designed 
 exclusively for the capacities and needs of Great Britain. 
 Hence Irish revenue is both excessive and inadequate . 
 
 " Excessive "? " Inadequate "? What do these terms really 
 mean ? Let us once and for all clear our minds of all obscurity 
 and look the facts in the face. No one knows what Irish revenue 
 and expenditure ought to be, or would be, if Irishmen had 
 controlled their own destinies. It is useless to parade immense 
 sums as the cash equivalent of over-taxation ; it is idle to array 
 against them rival figures of over-expenditure. Normal Irish 
 revenue and normal Irish expenditure are matters of specula- 
 tion. For all we know, Ireland, had she been permitted 
 normal political development, would be raising a larger 
 revenue, and feeling it less ; while it is absolutely certain that 
 she would be paying her own way and contributing to Imperial 
 services more, in proportion to her resources, than she did 
 before the Union. The political and therefore the economic 
 development of Ireland have been deliberately and forcibly 
 arrested. I do not say malignantly, because there was no 
 malignant intention. But the action, if mistaken, was de- 
 liberately and consistently sustained. Much of Irish industrial 
 talent was lost irrevocably before the old industrial restrictions 
 were removed. There remained the land, an immense source 
 of potential wealth, if properly developed under a rational 
 system of agrarian tenure. For the best part of a century after 
 the Union, the agrarian tenure, dating from the first genuine 
 colonization of Ireland, when the land was confiscated whole- 
 sale and the peasantry enslaved, was maintained by force of 
 arms. Thirty years ago (if we date from the Land Act of 
 1881) we began to change this tenure into another equally 
 defective, though far more favourable to the tenant. A little 
 later, but only eight years ago, on a thorough and systematic 
 scale, we began the parallel policy of Land Purchase. Even 
 now, having transferred half the land to peasant ownership, 
 and placed the other half under judicial rents, many of our 
 statesmen are unwilling to give Ireland the control of its own
 
 264 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 affairs. On the contrary, step by step with the economic en- 
 franchisement of the farmers, has gone the policy of destroying 
 their personal and political independence, and forcing them to 
 look outside their own country for financial aid, by spending 
 money upon Ireland which Irishmen have no direct responsi- 
 bility for raising. What a travesty of statesmanship ! First, 
 having assisted the farmer to buy his own land, to clap him 
 on the back with " Now, my fine fellow, you are a free man." 
 In the same breath to tell him that he is not fit to have a direct 
 voice in the management of his own country's affairs, and to 
 try and reconcile him to this insult by sapping that very 
 independence of character which the acquirement of a freehold 
 has begun to instil in him. 
 
 I described in Chapter IX. how a number of patriotic 
 Irishmen, working both at industrial and agricultural develop- 
 ment, have striven to counteract this fatal tendency, and 
 to persuade their countrymen to rely on themselves alone. 
 But I venture to repeat what I said then, that without the 
 bracing discipline of Home Rule, and, above all, of the 
 financial Home Rule, these efforts are doomed to comparative 
 failure. 
 
 It is absolutely necessary to produce an equilibrium between 
 revenue and expenditure in Ireland, as in every other country 
 in the world. Whatever the temporary strain upon Ireland, 
 whatever the sacrifices involved, the thing must be done, and 
 done now or never. Great Britain's interest is something, but 
 it is trivial beside that of Ireland. The situation is growing 
 worse, not better, and Irishmen should unite to insist that the 
 whole system should stop. 
 
 IT. 
 IRISH EXPENDITURE. 
 
 Let us look a little more closely at Irish expenditure, as 
 disclosed hi the Treasury returns. 
 
 For purposes of comparison, I set out first the main heads 
 of Civil Expenditure for England, Scotland, and Ireland in 
 the year 1910-11 :* 
 
 * Treasury Return, No. 220, 1911.
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 265 
 
 Population. 
 
 England, 
 36,075,269. 
 
 Scotland, 
 4,759,521. 
 
 Ireland, 
 4,381,951. 
 
 Civil Government Charges, 1910-11 : 
 (a) On Consolidated Fund : 
 (1) Civil List, Salaries, Pensions, 
 and Miscellaneous Charges 
 (2) Development and Boad Im- 
 provement Funds 
 (3) Payments to Local Taxation 
 Accounts, etc. 
 (6) Voted 
 
 
 
 340,500 
 
 7,199,500 
 26,121,500 
 
 
 148,000 
 
 1,204,500 
 4,180,500 
 
 
 
 138,500 
 
 1,477,500 
 8,026,000 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total Civil Government Charges ... 
 
 33,661,500 
 
 5,533,000 
 
 9,642,000 
 
 Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue 
 Post Office Services 
 
 3,157,000 
 15,798,500 
 
 464,000 
 1,930,000 
 
 298,000 
 1,404,500 
 
 Total Expenditure 
 
 52,617,000 
 
 7,927,000 
 
 11,344,500 
 
 Per head of population 
 
 s. d. 
 192 
 
 s. d. 
 
 1 13 3 
 
 8. d. 
 2 11 9 
 
 The totals, if we consider relative populations, appear 
 startling. 
 
 Look at the third, or Irish, column, and set aside the two 
 last items, " Customs, Excise, and Inland Revenue," and 
 " Post-Office Services," which represent the cost of collecting 
 Irish Revenue and maintaining the Irish postal, telegraph, 
 and telephone services. We may note in passing, however, 
 that the Post-Office receipts in Ireland in 1910-11, according 
 to the Treasury estimate, were less than the outgoings by 
 249,000 (receipts, 1,155,500 ; outgoings, 1,404,500). 
 
 The Civil Government Charges are the most important heads 
 of expense, and these are divided into two main classes : 
 (a) charged on Consolidated Fund ; (6) Voted. 
 
 Class (a) consists of (1) Salaries, Pensions, etc. ; (2) Develop- 
 ment and Road Improvement Funds ; (3) Payments to Local 
 Taxation Accounts. 
 
 In other parts of Return No. 220 will be found the details 
 of expenditure in these various classes : 
 
 (1) The Salaries and Pensions need not detain us long. The 
 principal item is judicial salaries, 102,000, as compared with
 
 266 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 282,000 for England, which has more than eight times the 
 population of Ireland. Another item, 20,000 for the Lord- 
 Lieutenant, is double the sum allotted to any Colonial Governor, 
 even of the Dominion of Canada, which has nearly twice the 
 population of Ireland. But the extravagance lies, not in the 
 cash amount, but in the fact that the Irish Lord- Lieutenancy 
 is, under present conditions, an anomalous institution. No 
 Irishman would grudge a penny of the sum if the Lord- 
 Lieutenant, like a Colonial Governor, presided over a re- 
 sponsibly governed Ireland. 
 
 (2) Road Improvement and Development Funds. This 
 category is blank for the year 1910-11. There will be payments 
 for the current year which will swell the Irish expenditure. 
 
 (3) Payments to Local Taxation Accounts, 1,477,500. This 
 raises an intricate subject, into which I cannot enter in great 
 detail. It is well known that the whole system of relieving 
 local taxation out of Imperial taxation needs thorough re- 
 vision. Meanwhile Ireland, like other parts of Great Britain, 
 has been allotted at various times a multitude of different grants 
 under various Acts, but principally under the Local Govern- 
 ment (Ireland) Act, 1898, and the Finance Acts of recent years. 
 
 Local Government on the British pattern was, as I have 
 already described, extended to Ireland only in 1898. The 
 money now raised in Ireland by Local Taxation is about 
 4,800,000, exclusive of the Grants in Aid which we are now 
 considering, and which appear, rightly, on the national balance- 
 sheet because they come from the common purse.* They are 
 based on different principles, and originated in many different 
 ways. Some are fixed annual sums, determined either by 
 some arbitrary standard or (as in the case of the Licence Duty 
 grants and the Customs and Excise grantsf) on the Irish pro- 
 ceeds of certain duties in a year taken as standard. The 
 Estate Duty grants still vary with the total product of duties 
 in the United Kingdom, and are still allocated on the propor- 
 tion settled by Mr. Goschen in 1888 namely, 9 parts to Ireland, 
 11 to Scotland, and 80 to England. J If the proportion were 
 to be revised now, and, on Mr. Goschen's method, made to 
 
 * A list is given at p. 10 of Return 220 (1911), and an admirable exposi- 
 tion of the whole subject from the Irish standpoint will be found in Professor 
 Oldham's seventh published lecture on the " Public Finances of Ireland" (1911). 
 
 t The " Whisky Money " was so treated under the Finance Act of 1910. 
 
 J See p. 238,
 
 THE PKESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 267 
 
 correspond to the respective estimated contributions to Im- 
 perial Services, Ireland, instead of getting 418,000, would get 
 nothing at all. The largest item in the list namely, the 
 " Agricultural Grant," a fixed annual sum of 728,000, dating 
 from the Local Government Act of 1898 was designed partly 
 to reconcile Irish landlords to the passage of that Act. Nearly 
 half of it represented the remission of the landlord's half-share 
 of the poor-rate on agricultural land, as estimated in the 
 standard year 1896-97. The English precedent for this was 
 the Agricultural Rates Act of 1896, which relieved the English 
 owner of agricultural land in a similar way. Irish conditions 
 were so different, however, that it was felt necessary in this 
 case to balance the landlord's boon with an equivalent boon 
 to the tenant ; so that half the tenant's share of the county 
 cess was also remitted. The result was a disproportionately 
 large grant as compared with those received by England and 
 Scotland.* We must remark, as one of the minor intricacies 
 of Irish finance, that all these grants do not actually go in 
 relief of Local Taxation. Some of them are diverted to public 
 Departments, such as the Board of Intermediate Education, the 
 Congested Districts Board, and the Department of Agriculture. 
 All these grants will cease, as such, after Home Rule, while 
 their amount must be reckoned as part of the cost of Irish 
 Government. The Irish Parliament will have to revise the 
 whole system of relief to Local Taxation and establish it on 
 some simple and rational basis. Meanwhile, it is important 
 to remember that the Irish grants form the major part of the 
 Guarantee Fund set up by the Land Purchase Acts, and, until 
 the last amending Land Act of 1909, were chargeable the 
 Estate Duties Grant, in the first instance, the Agricultural 
 Grant in the second instance with the increasingly heavy 
 losses incurred in floating Land Stock below par. In 1908-09 
 the sums so withdrawn amounted to 90,000. That liability 
 was removed by Mr. Birrell's Act, and they now remain 
 chargeable only with any arrears in the annuities paid by the 
 purchasing tenants. This is a negligible liability, and should 
 properly be placed upon the Irish Government as a whole, 
 which, if it pleased, could recover the money from localities.! 
 
 * Between 1896 and 1898 the equivalent grants to Scotland and Ireland 
 were based on the Goschen proportion, 80, 11, 9, the English grant being 
 taken as standard. Scotch grants are now determined by special legislation. 
 
 t See Chapter XIV.
 
 268 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 We now reach the category (6) " Voted," and find in the 
 Irish column the truly enormous sum of 8,026,000 nearly 
 double that of Scotland (4,180,500), which has a population 
 slightly greater, and more than a third of that of England 
 (26,121,500), which has a population eight times as great. 
 
 When we search the various tables of detailed expenditure, 
 three prominent items arrest our attention : 
 
 Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police* ... 1,464,500 
 
 Old Age Pensions .2,408,000 
 
 Public (i.e., Primary) Education .1,632,000 
 
 5,504,500 
 
 Those three items may be said to epitomize the history of 
 Ireland under the Union coercion, pauperization, deficient 
 education. The first two are, of course, intimately connected. 
 The existing cost of police, surviving needlessly at the mon- 
 strous figure shown, represents the past cost of enforcing laws 
 economically hurtful to Ireland. The economic hurt is reflected 
 in the cost of Old Age Pensions paid to a disproportionately 
 large number of old people, below the official standard of 
 wealth, in a country drained by emigration for seventy years 
 past of its strongest sons and daughters. Police in Ireland 
 costs twice as much as in England and Scotland, where (with 
 the exception of the London Metropolitan Police) it is a local, 
 not a national charge, while Irish Old Age Pensions cost in 
 1910-11 more than twice as much as Scottish Pensions, and 
 amounted to two-fifths of English Pensions. f With full 
 allowance for excess payments owing to the lack of all birth 
 records prior to a certain date, the Irish figure is relatively 
 enormous. It is 100,000 greater than the whole cost of Irish 
 Government in 1860, and, with the addition made in the 
 estimates of the present year, it is just a million more than 
 what, according to Sir David Barbour's reasoning, would have 
 been the whole cost of Irish Government in 1893-94, had Irish 
 expenditure, like Irish revenue, been in proportion to the 
 taxable capacity of Ireland. 
 
 * Only part of the Dublin Metropolitan Police is paid out of State Funds, 
 the rest by the City of Dublin. 
 
 f The relative figures were : Ireland, 2,408,000 ; Scotland, 1,064,000 ; 
 England, 6,825,500. The recent removal of the disqualification for Poor 
 Law Belief adds considerably to these amounts.
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 269 
 
 I touched upon the Irish aspect of the policy of Old Age 
 Pensions at p. 181. Whatever the pecuniary charge, I 
 suggest that it is absolutely necessary for Ireland in the future 
 to control both payment and policy, and she might find it in 
 her best interest, with due notice and due regard to present 
 interests, to halve the scale of pensions. It is not a question 
 of the general policy of Old Age Pensions, but of the applica- 
 bility of a certain scale to Ireland, where agricultural wages 
 (for example) average only 11s. 3d. as compared with 18s. 4d. 
 for England, and 19s. 7d. for Scotland.* Of all ways of 
 remedying a backward economic condition, that of excessive 
 pensions is the worst. 
 
 The cost of Irish Primary Education 1,632,000, as I 
 pointed out in Chapter IX. is at once too high and too low ; 
 too high in the sense that much of it is wasted owing to the 
 lack of popular control, too low in the sense that it is a scandal 
 to spend nearly as much on police as on the education of 
 children, and 800,000 more on Old Age Pensions than on the 
 education of children. If part or even the whole of the 
 additional expense eventually necessary is raised by rates, so 
 much the better. Accurate comparison is difficult with the 
 English and Scottish expenditure on elementary education, 
 because the greater part of the cost in those countries is borne 
 by private endowments and local rates, whereas in Ireland no 
 local rate is raised for elementary education, there are no 
 endowments, and private subscriptions are very small. f It 
 is certain, however, that far greater sums, in proportion to 
 population, are spent in England and Scotland than in Ireland. 
 This is little to be wondered at if we consider the painful 
 history of education in Ireland ; but we cannot recall the past, 
 and, as I urged in Chapter IX., one of the first duties of a free 
 Ireland will be to improve the education of the children. 
 
 * In the poorest parts of Ireland they range as low as 9s. 
 
 f See pp. 174-176. In 1908, England and Wales spent 21,987,004 on 
 elementary education, and raised 10,467,804 for it in rates, Of the rest, 
 11,104,305 caine from Parliamentary grants. Fees and endowment incomes 
 of voluntary schools are not included (Statistical Abstract of United King- 
 dom, 1910). 
 
 The actual Parliamentary Votes, as they appear in the accounts for 
 1910-11, are: England (Class IV.), "Board of Education," 14,166,500; 
 Scotland, " Public Education," 2,250,000 ; Ireland, " Public Education," 
 1,632,000. But the English Votes include sums devoted to technical 
 education, museums, etc., whose counterparts in Ireland come under other 
 departments.
 
 270 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 The Irish vote for Universities and Colleges, 166,000, has 
 been swelled by the recent establishment of the National Uni- 
 versity. No item in the whole list represents money better spent. 
 
 With regard to other Irish services, I shall make use, with 
 Professor Oldham's consent, of some interesting tables compiled 
 by him, showing the principal variations in Irish expenditure 
 since the year 1891-92.* 
 
 They include certain expenses which I have already alluded 
 to, and others which I shall have to remark upon further, 
 besides giving a general view of the growth in the cost of Irish 
 government. Neither of lists A or B is exhaustive : 
 
 A. INCREASES OF EXPENDITURE. 
 
 
 1910-11. 
 
 1891-92. 
 
 1. Old Age Pensions ... . . 
 
 
 
 2408000 
 
 
 
 2. Primary Education ... 
 
 1,632,000 
 
 843,755 
 
 3. Universities and Colleges 
 4. Payments to Local Taxation Account 
 
 166,000 
 1,477,500 
 
 26,000 
 399,260 
 
 5. Ireland Development Grant 
 
 191,500 
 
 
 
 6. Post Office 
 
 1,404,500 
 
 749,046 
 
 7. Cost of collecting Irish Revenue ... 
 8. Surveys of United Kingdom 
 
 298,000 
 81,000 
 
 223,362 
 47,603 
 
 9. Land Commission 
 
 414,500 
 
 91,826 
 
 10. Department of Agriculture ... 
 11. Other items (fivef) ... 
 
 415,000 
 240,500 
 
 44,630 
 172,918 
 
 
 
 
 
 8,728,500 
 
 2,598,400 
 
 Nos. 1 to 4 I have already dealt with, but it is interesting 
 to note the contrasting figures of 1893-94. 
 
 No. 5. The Ireland Development Grant of 191,500 is 
 interesting as an example of the haphazard methods of Anglo- 
 Irish finance. It is an annual sum voted for various develop- 
 
 * Two years earlier than the date I have chiefly used for purposes of com- 
 parison, but the difference is not material. In point of fact, the expenditure 
 was .300,000 less in the later than in the earlier year. 
 
 t (1) Rates on Government Buildings ; (2) Superannuation ; (3) Govern- 
 ment Printing ; (4) Board of Works ; (5) Home Office.
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 271 
 
 ment purposes, and was originally established (at the figure of 
 185,000) in 1903 as an equivalent for the capitation grants for 
 school attendance in England, given under the Education Act 
 of 1902 in lieu of school fees. In allotting the Irish equivalent, 
 Mr. Goschen's proportion of 80, 11, 9 was for the first time 
 condemned by all parties. What the proportion ought to be 
 was a matter of dispute, but it was fixed hi this case on the 
 basis of population. Since the English grant has now risen 
 to 2,500,000, the Irish proportion therefore is now, strictly 
 speaking, inadequate. 
 
 Nos. 6, 7, and 8 are examples of charges debited by the 
 Treasury against Ireland which are open to criticism as long as 
 the Union lasts, and which meet with much complaint in Ireland. 
 Obviously, however, the first two at any rate are charges 
 which an Ireland financially independent would have to bear. 
 
 No. 9. The Land Commission vote of 414,500 is of course 
 the direct result of an abnormally bad system, necessitating 
 abnormal and costly remedial administration. Ireland herself 
 is not morally responsible for a penny of it, but if she is wise 
 she will shoulder the cost as a corollary of responsible govern- 
 ment. Small administrative economies may be made, and 
 the cost will disappear altogether with the completion of Land 
 Purchase, say in fifteen years, but in the immediate future no 
 reduction can be counted on with certainty. The figure given 
 includes the cost of the Land Commission proper, which deals 
 with Judicial Rents and manages finance, as well as the cost 
 of the Estates Commissioners who conduct the machinery of 
 Land Purchase. It also includes losses on the flotation of 
 Land Stock at a discount, and the interest and sinking-fund 
 on the Stock raised to pay the bonus to landlords. 
 
 No. 10. The vote of 415,000 for the Department of Agri- 
 culture, whose origin and functions I described in Chapter IX., 
 does not accurately show the actual cost of the Department, 
 because it excludes the greater part of an Endowment Income 
 of 166,000 a year, derived partly from the Irish Church Fund, 
 partly from the Irish Local Taxation Account, and partly from 
 the interest on a capital endowment of 200,000, as well as 
 other small miscellaneous grants. But it includes a sum of 
 about 44,000 for some museums, colleges, gardens, etc., whose 
 English counterparts are subsidized under different votes, as
 
 272 
 
 well as the sum of 144,000 for the Congested Districts Board.* 
 Nor does this latter sum represent the full cost of the Congested 
 Districts Board, which has also an Endowment Income from 
 the Irish Church Fund of 41,250, a subsidy from the Ireland 
 Development Grant, and a fluctuating income from various 
 sources rents, etc. 
 
 Part of the expense of the Department itself must be 
 regarded as abnormal, in view of the extraordinarily backward 
 economic condition of the country when it was founded. Nor, 
 valuable as the Department's work is, can it be safely assumed 
 that the cost is not extravagant. As long as any Department 
 relies on an Imperial vote there can be no certainty that the 
 expenditure will be economical. The whole cost of the Con- 
 gested Districts Board is abnormal. Its very existence is 
 evidence of the failure of external government in Ireland, 
 and, as I urged in Chapter IX., the whole question of the treat- 
 ment of the congested districts needs thorough investigation 
 at the hands of a responsible Irish Government. 
 
 B. REDUCTIONS IN EXPENDITURE. 
 
 
 
 
 
 1910-11. 
 
 1891-92. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5,000 
 
 
 
 183 675 
 
 2. Pauper Lunatics Grant 
 3. Teachers' Pensions Grant 
 4. Railways (Ireland) Grant 
 5. Local Government Board 
 6. Chief Secretary's Offices 
 7. Registrar-General's Office 
 8. Justice and Police ... 
 
 
 
 
 61,000 
 92,500 
 27,500 
 13,000 
 2,090,500 
 
 111,655 
 90,000 
 341,934 
 132,748 
 39,681 
 29,926 
 2,129,849 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2,289,500 
 
 3,059,468 
 
 Most of these reductions are deceptive. No. 1 is the saving of an ab- 
 normal grant, Nos. 2 and 5 signify mere transfers to Grants in Aid of Local 
 Taxation, No. 7 a transfer of duties to the Department of Agriculture. 
 
 * Department of Agriculture, Endowment Fund : 
 
 , f(l) Local Taxation Account ... 78,000 
 
 Incomefrom \ (2) Irish Church Fund 70,000 
 
 (3) Interest on Capital sum of 200,000. 
 Also (in 1909-10) : 
 
 From Ireland Development Fund 7,000 
 
 Under an Act of 1902 5,000
 
 THE PEESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 
 
 273 
 
 The table shows a total reduction of 769,968, while Table A 
 shows a total increase of 6,130,000. Together they account 
 for an increase since 1891-92 of 5,360,032. 
 
 Here is a similar table, confined to Justice and Police : 
 
 C. EXPENDITURE ON JUSTICE AND POLICE. 
 
 
 1910-n. 
 
 1891-92. 
 
 1. Judicial Salaries 
 
 
 
 102,000 
 
 
 
 110 244 
 
 2. Dublin Metropolitan Police 
 8. Royal Irish Constabulary ... 
 
 4. Judicial Pensions, etc. 
 5. Law Charges . . . ... ... ... 
 
 93,500 
 1,871,000 
 
 15,000 
 65,500 
 
 91,998 
 1,362,848 
 
 18,656 
 71 977 
 
 6. Superior Courts Offices 
 7. County Courts Offices 
 8. Prisons, etc. ... 
 
 110,500 
 109,000 
 112,000 
 
 116,851 
 112,895 
 134 429 
 
 9. Reformatories, etc. ... 
 
 112,000 
 
 110,451 
 
 
 
 
 
 2,090,500 
 
 2,129,849 
 
 To Nos. 1, 2, and 3 I have already referred. The whole 
 charge of two millions, though it shows a slight decrease hi 
 twenty years, is grossly out of proportion to the resources of 
 Ireland. Under heads 6 and 7 are included a number of 
 posts which are notoriously little more than sinecures. 
 
 To sum up once more, the cost of the Irish Government as 
 paid out of the common purse in the last completed financial 
 year was 11,344,500, or 2 11s. 9d. per head of the population, 
 as compared with a cost per head of 1 9s. 2d. in England, and 
 in Scotland of 1 13s. 3d. But this is not the minimum figure 
 with which we have to reckon in considering the Home Rule 
 scheme ; some items show a marked increase in the Estimates 
 of the current year : (1) The increase in Old Age Pensions, not 
 certain yet, will be at least 250,000. (2) The Land Commission 
 is 544,000, as compared with 414,500. (3) Universities and 
 Colleges, 186,256, as compared with 166,000. (4) Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture, 426,609, as compared with 415,000. 
 (5) Registrar-General's Office, 29,020, as compared with 
 13,000. (6) Valuation and Boundary Survey, 44,581, as 
 compared with 30,000. (7) Public Works and Buildings hi 
 Ireland, 273,370, as compared with 215,000. Even with 
 
 18
 
 274 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 allowance for over-estimates, especially in the last of these 
 items,* we must anticipate an increase of nearly half a million 
 under the above heads, to which we must add 150,000 
 recently allocated by the Road Board 1 to Ireland for the 
 year 1911-12, and 34,750 already allocated by. the Develop- 
 ment Commissioners. If Ireland comes prematurely into the 
 National Insurance scheme, and assumes eventual financial 
 responsibility for her share of the cost, that will be an addi- 
 tional source of expense ; but it is to be hoped that her leaders, 
 in common prudence, will henceforth endeavour to stem the 
 rising flood of Irish expenditure, and so facilitate the retrench- 
 ments imperatively necessary under Home Rule. As it is, the 
 total outgoings of the current year (1911-12), swelled by the 
 increases shown above, will probably amount to 12,000,000, 
 while this total will in its turn be added to by the office costs 
 of the Irish Legislature and the salaries of Ministers. 
 
 The scheme framed cannot assume immediate economies, 
 and a responsible Ireland alone can decide the nature and 
 extent of the drastic economies which must be made in the 
 future. Beyond the brief remarks and hints made in the course 
 of this chapter, I myself venture only to lay down the broad 
 proposition that, to the last farthing, Irish revenue must 
 govern and limit Irish expenditure. For any hardship en- 
 tailed in achieving that aim Ireland will find superabundant 
 compensation in the moral independence which is the founda- 
 tion of national welfare. She will be sorely tempted to sell 
 part of her freedom for a price. At whatever cost, she will 
 be wise to resist. 
 
 If Irish revenue is to be the measure of Irish expenditure, it 
 follows that it must be wholly, or at any rate predominately, 
 under Irish control. Let us look a little more closely, there- 
 fore, into its amount and composition. 
 
 III. 
 IRISH REVENUE. 
 
 As I have already pointed out, in order to arrive at the 
 present revenue of Ireland, our best course is to take the mean 
 
 * The amount voted for Public Works in 1910-11 was 259,848 [see 
 "Civil Service Estimates" for 1911-12 (No. 631911)]; the amount spent, 
 according to Return No. 220, 215,000.
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 
 
 275 
 
 tax revenue of the two years 1909-10 and 1910-11, and to 
 add to it the non-tax revenue of 1910-1 1, which was, of course, 
 unaffected by the delay in passing the Budget of 1909. For 
 clearness, however, I first set out separately the Irish figures 
 of these two years, distinguishing between tax revenue and 
 non-tax revenue, and giving the " collected " revenue and the 
 " true " revenue in different columns : 
 
 
 1909-10. 
 
 
 1910-11. 
 
 Revenue as 
 Collected. 
 
 " True." 
 
 Revenue as 
 Collected. 
 
 "True" 
 
 TAX EEVENUE. 
 
 Customs 
 Excise 
 Estate, etc., Duties 
 Stamps 
 Income Tax 
 Land Value Duties 
 
 
 
 2,742,000 
 4,487,000 
 684,000 
 293,000 
 388,000 
 
 
 
 2,755,000 
 2,898,000 
 684,000 
 315,000 
 451,000 
 
 
 
 3,103,000 
 5,826,000 
 1,144,000 
 326,000 
 1,825,000 
 1,000 
 
 
 2,977,000 
 3,734,000 
 1,144,000 
 351,000 
 2,164,000 
 1,000 
 
 Total Irish Eevenue from\ 
 Taxes / 
 
 8,594,000 
 
 7,103,000 
 
 12,225,000 
 
 10,371,000 
 
 NON-TAX REVENUE. 
 
 Postal Service 
 Telegraph Service 
 Telephone Service 
 Crown Lands 
 Miscellaneous 
 
 900,000 
 180,000 
 30,000 
 26,000 
 116,000 
 
 900,000 
 180,000 
 30,000 
 26,000 
 116,000 
 
 935,000 
 185,500 
 35,000 
 24,500 
 114,500 
 
 935,000 
 185,500 
 35,000 
 24,500 
 114,500 
 
 Total Irish Non-Tax EeO 
 venue J 
 
 1,252,000 
 
 1,252,000 
 
 1,294,500 
 
 1,294,500 
 
 Aggregate Irish Eevenue 
 Percentage of the Aggro-] 
 gate Eevenue of the [ 
 United Kingdom ...j 
 
 9,846,000 
 7-52 
 
 8,355,000 
 6-38 
 
 13,519,500 
 6-57 
 
 11,665,500 
 5-67 
 
 On p. 276 are the details of the mean tax revenue, 
 "collected" and "true," of the two years 1909-10, 1910-11, 
 with the non-tax revenue of the latest year, 1910-11, added 
 to them. 
 
 The two aggregate figures at the bottom, 11,704,500 and 
 10,032,000, approximately represent the Treasury estimate of 
 the " collected " and the " true " revenue of Ireland, respec-
 
 276 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 tively, at the present day. They are confirmed by the figures 
 of previous years ; for the average revenue of the five years, 
 1904-09, was as follows : " collected," 11,320,000 ; " true " or 
 " contributed," 9,612,400, the new taxation of 1909-10 having 
 added 500,000 to the " true " revenue. I must again remind 
 the reader, however, that the figures are open to the criticism 
 that the adjustment between the " collected " tax revenue 
 
 PRESENT IRISH REVENUE (MEAN OF THE LAST Two YEARS). 
 
 Datails of Revenue. 
 
 Mean Collected Tax 
 Revenue of the 
 Years 1909-10, 
 1910-11. 
 
 Mean "True "or 
 " Contributed " Tax 
 Revenue of the Years 
 1909-10, 1910-11. 
 
 TAX REVENUE. 
 
 Indirect /Customs 
 Taxation! Excise (incl. licences 284,500) 
 
 
 2,922,500 
 5,156,500 
 
 
 
 2,866,000 
 3,316,000 
 
 Total Indirect Taxation 
 
 8,079,000 
 
 6,182,000 
 
 /Estate Duties 
 
 Direct Taxation f am f TaY 
 Income Tax ... 
 
 (Land Value Duties... 
 
 914,000 
 309,500 
 1,106,500 
 1,000 
 
 914,000 
 333,000 
 1,307,500 
 1,000 
 
 Total Direct Taxation 
 
 2,331,000 
 
 2,555,500 
 
 Total Tax Revenue 
 
 10,410,000 
 
 8,737,500 
 
 NON-TAX REVENUE (1910-11). 
 Postal Service 
 
 935,000 
 
 935,000 
 
 Telegraph Service... ... ... 
 
 185,500 
 
 185 500 
 
 Telephone Service 
 Crown Lands ... . ... 
 
 35,000 
 24500 
 
 35,000 
 24500 
 
 Miscellaneous ... ... ... ... 
 
 114,500 
 
 114500 
 
 
 
 
 Total Non-Tax Revenue (1910-11) 
 
 1,294,500 
 
 1,294,500 
 
 
 Collected Revenue 
 at the Present Day. 
 
 "True" or "Contri- 
 buted " Revenue at 
 the Present Day. 
 
 Aeerregrates 
 
 11,704,500 
 
 10 032 000 
 
 
 
 
 and the " true " revenue is inaccurate owing to the methods 
 employed by the Treasury. It will be observed that the 
 resulting net deduction from the " collected " tax revenue of 
 to-day, a deduction attributable, on the balance of the various 
 figures, almost exclusively to Excise,* and mainly to the
 
 THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 277 
 
 Excise duty on spirits, amounts to 1,672,500, and makes 
 all the difference between the solvency and insolvency 
 of Ireland regarded as an independent financial unit. Her 
 expenditure, it will be remembered, was 11,344,500, her 
 "collected" revenue 11,704,500, leaving a surplus of 
 360,000, which becomes a deficit of 1,312,500 if we reckon 
 only the " true " or " contributed " revenue of 10,032,000. 
 On the other hand, the principle, as distinguished from the 
 methods of adjustment, is perfectly sound if we wish to arrive 
 at a correct idea of the financial position of Ireland. The 
 1,672,500 virtually represents the duties on goods exported 
 from Ireland, and consumed in Great Britain, or rather the 
 excess of these duties over those levied on goods exported from 
 Great Britain and consumed in Ireland. The consumer pays 
 the tax on dutiable commodities, and a financially independent 
 Ireland could not raise revenue twice over from the same 
 commodity. She would, for example, have to give a drawback 
 from the Excise duty on spirits exported to England, since a 
 Customs duty would be levied on its import into England. 
 On the other hand, she would be entitled to every penny of 
 revenue derived from the tea and sugar imported into and 
 consumed within her borders, and to the full income tax on 
 property held by Irishmen. 
 
 Now, for two reasons, I do not propose to make any ex- 
 haustive inquiry into the accuracy of Treasury adjustments 
 for " true " revenue. My first reason is, that full material for 
 calculation cannot be obtained by any private individual, and 
 could not be obtained and worked up even by the Treasury 
 without an enormous expenditure of time and trouble. The 
 most careful inquiry I have seen is embodied in an exceedingly 
 
 * Under the heads of Excise, the principal deduction is in Spirits (1,793,000 
 in 1910-11) and Beer (309,000 in 1910-11). 
 
 The items of Irish tax revenue in which the Treasury make no adjust- 
 ment are : Excise Licenses (356,000 in 1910-11) ; Club Duty (2,000 in 
 1910-11); "other items" (10,000 in 1910-11); Cards and Patent Medicines 
 (10,000 in 1910-11) ; " Estate, etc., Duties" (1,144,000 in 1910-11) ; Income 
 Tax (Schedules A and B) (694,000 in 1910-11 abnormally large figure 
 owing to non-collection in previous year) ; Land Value Duties (1,000 in 
 1910-11). 
 
 All the heads of Customs revenue are subject to adjustment, though the 
 total result is only a small deduction from Ireland (126,000 in 1910-11). In 
 all but two the adjustment is in favour of Ireland. The two exceptions are 
 "Foreign Spirits," where a deduction of 25,000 is made in 1910-11, and 
 Tobacco, where a deduction of 620,000 is made in 1910-11.
 
 278 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 able pamphlet by "an Irishman," entitled " The Financial 
 Relations of Ireland with the Imperial Exchequer," and I 
 mention below a few of the criticisms made by the writer. 
 His and other investigations seem to prove that Irish revenue 
 is considerably underestimated, perhaps by half a million.* 
 My second reason is that errors of adjustment hi either 
 direction cannot affect hi any substantial way the kind of 
 financial scheme we are to adopt in the Home Rule Bill. 
 
 Let us fix our attention, then, on the second of the two 
 columns in the table on p. 276, showing the aggregate " true " 
 
 * Income Tax, Schedules C and D (dividends from Government Stocks, 
 public companies, foreign dividends, etc.). The Treasury estimate (as stated 
 in a side-note to the Return) is based on statistics of Estate Duty for the 
 five years ending 1908. But what light can Estate Duty throw on (for 
 example) the dividends collected at the source from British or foreign 
 securities held by Irish banks ? Schedule C deals with " Government 
 Stocks, etc.," Schedule D with " Public Companies, Foreign Dividends, 
 etc.," but in the adjustment for "true" revenue no distinction is made 
 between them. Now the Banking Statistics (Ireland) of 1910 show that 
 dividends were payable at the Bank of Ireland on .38,782,000 of Govern- 
 ment securities, and that, in addition, a debt bearing interest was due to the 
 Bank from the Government of 2^ millions. Income Tax on these items 
 alone would be .65,000, less rebates ; but the whole of Schedule C, which 
 includes Foreign and Colonial Government Stocks, is given in 1909-10 as 
 only 30,000. 
 
 No attempt is made to credit Ireland with a share of the profits made by 
 English and Scottish companies through business done in Ireland. 
 
 The only reliable items in Income Tax are those of A and B (Land, Houses, 
 and Occupation of Land), where in 1908-09 Ireland contributed about 6 per 
 cent, of the total ; under other heads, according to the Treasury, only 3'5 per 
 cent. The writer estimates the true contribution as several hundred thousand 
 pounds more. 
 
 Post Office. The Treasury give no clue as to how they calculate the profit 
 and loss on Postal Services. Figures of letters, telegrams, parcels, etc., de- 
 livered in Ireland are known from the Postmaster-General's report, but the 
 report does not distinguish Irish from English postal orders, of which 12l 
 millions were issued in the United Kingdom in 1909-10. There is good reason 
 to believe that a part of the postal profit now wholly credited to England 
 should in reality be credited to Ireland. 
 
 Stamps. Far too little allowance is made by the Treasury for stamps on 
 transfers executed through English and Scottish exchanges for shares bought 
 or sold by Irishmen, and for bonds, deeds, insurances, issues of capital, etc. 
 
 Tea and Sugar. The Treasury base their calculation " on quantities inter- 
 changed between Great Britain and Ireland in 1903-04," and I learn from the 
 Inland Revenue Department that by this means the consumption per head of 
 the population was arrived at, and that the present official figures are based 
 on the assumption that the relation of consumption per head in Ireland to 
 consumption per head in the United Kingdom as a whole has not altered 
 since 1903-04. The unreliability of this assumption is manifest. It is probable 
 that the heavy additional duty on spirits has raised the consumption of tea in 
 Ireland more than in Great Britain, and the figures of Imports compiled by 
 the Department of Agriculture seem to confirm this view.
 
 THE PKESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 279 
 
 revenue of Ireland at the present day. Disregard the non-tax 
 revenue from the various postal services (which represents 
 payment for services rendered, and is swallowed up by an excess 
 on the expenditure side of 249,000), and examine the heads 
 of tax revenue shown in the upper half of the column. It will 
 be seen that 70-75 per cent, of Irish " true " revenue is 
 derived from Customs and Excise duties, which, with the 
 exception perhaps of licence duties, may be classed as in- 
 direct taxation. The deduction for " true " revenue, it will 
 be observed, has considerably modified the proportion, which 
 for "collected" revenue works out at 77-61 per cent., or 
 nearly four-fifths. 
 
 As the reader is aware, this is not a new feature in Irish 
 finance. It formed the basis of the Report of the Financial 
 Relations Commission with regard to the over-taxation of Ire- 
 land. Much the greater part of Irish revenue, even since the 
 abolition of protective duties and the substitution of direct 
 taxation, has always been derived from taxes on articles of 
 common consumption, the simple reason being that Ireland is 
 a country where there is little accumulated wealth from which 
 to extract direct taxation. In Great Britain, whose circum- 
 stances dictate the finance of the United Kingdom, no less 
 than 54-79 per cent, of the tax revenue is derived from direct 
 taxation, only 45-21 per cent, from Customs and Excise.* 
 
 The Irish figures show that to retain in the hands of the 
 Imperial Parliament the control of Irish Customs and Excise 
 will be to retain almost paramount control over Irish revenue ; 
 to deny Ireland the main lever she needs for co-ordinating her 
 expenditure and her revenue, and for making her taxation 
 suitable to her economic conditions. It will be to preserve 
 the framework of a fiscal system which the highest financial 
 authorities have pronounced to be unfair to Ireland, and which 
 incontrovertible facts show to be uneconomical both for 
 Ireland and Great Britain. 
 
 Meanwhile that system has at length produced a deficit, 
 with which I shall deal in the next chapter. Its amount, 
 probably exaggerated, must necessarily remain uncertain under 
 the present fiscal Union. One thing alone is certain, that it 
 will grow as long as that Union lasts. 
 
 * On the basis of the mean revenue of 1909-10 and 1910-11.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 
 I. 
 
 THE ESSENCE OF HOME RULE. 
 
 LET us now sum up this financial question, and give its place 
 in the general problem of Home Rule. In Chapter X. I 
 argued that, on broad grounds of political policy, Ireland, in 
 her own interest, and in the general interest of the United 
 Kingdom, should have ".Colonial " Home Rule without repre- 
 sentation in the Imperial Parliament. Leaving finance tem- 
 porarily aside, while observing that any substantial Imperial 
 control over Irish finance would defeat the " colonial " solution 
 of the problem, I endeavoured to show that there were no 
 tenable grounds of a non-financial character for retaining Irish 
 Members at Westminster, nor any dangers to be feared from 
 excluding them. I have now reviewed the history of Anglo- 
 Irish finance up to the present day, and I hope in so doing to 
 have proved that, so far from presenting an obstacle to 
 " Colonial " Home Rule,'the financial conditions demand such 
 a solution. Finance and policy are inseparably one. All the 
 considerations which render Home Rule desirable lead irre- 
 sistibly to the financial independence of Ireland, with complete 
 control assigned to her over all branches of taxation. Without 
 financial independence it is impossible to realize the objects 
 of Home Rule. It would be a miracle were the case otherwise. 
 Ireland would, indeed, be abnormal if, after her history, she 
 could reach prosperity and stability without passing through 
 a phase of financial independence. No parallel, even in the 
 most distant degree, could be found for any such metamor- 
 phosis in the whole of the British Empire. 
 
 If we study Ireland's interest, we shall promote Imperial 
 interests. The main object of Home Rule is to make Ireland 
 self-reliant. Lord Welby and his colleagues were right in 1896 
 when they declared that ideal to be impracticable without giving 
 
 280
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 281 
 
 Ireland entire responsibility both for her revenue and her 
 expenditure. This declaration is as true as ever. The situation 
 has changed only in one respect : that financial independence 
 will now mean a financial sacrifice to Ireland, whereas in 1896 
 it would have meant a financial gain to Ireland that is, if 
 Lord Welby's recommendation in favour of remitting the Irish 
 contribution to Imperial services had been carried out. At 
 that time Ireland contributed two millions. Now Great Britain 
 contributes over a million to Ireland. Sooner or later that 
 subsidy must stop, and the sooner it stops the better. 
 
 But it is of vital importance that Ireland should understand 
 the situation. The present position is dangerous, because 
 the Irish people at large are ignorant of the facts, and their 
 leaders are taking no steps to enlighten them. The reasons 
 are intelligible, but they are not sound reasons. Faced with 
 the facts and the choice, Ireland would not hesitate, but she 
 must know the facts and understand the nature of the choice. 
 
 II. 
 THE DEFICIT. 
 
 Let us deal at once with the question of the deficit. It is 
 inconceivable surely that the existence of a deficit should be 
 used as an argument against financial independence, much 
 less as an argument against Home Rule in general. Will 
 anyone be found to say that an island with a fertile soil, several 
 flourishing industries, and a clever population of four and a half 
 millions, is to be regarded, whatever its past history, as in- 
 capable of supporting a Government of its own out of its own 
 resources ? Let nobody be tempted by the fallacy that, given 
 time, Ireland will regain financial stability under the fiscal 
 Union, and at a later stage, perhaps, be more fitted to bear the 
 burden of fiscal independence. The supposition is chimerical. 
 The present system, besides being radically vicious in a purely 
 scientific sense, undermines the moral power of Ireland to 
 secure her own regeneration. 
 
 It is now 1911. The deficit, once a large surplus, came into 
 being only two years ago. It was the direct and inevitable 
 result of a fiscal Union against which Ireland has for generations
 
 282 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 unceasingly protested, and it was a result actually foretold in 
 1896 by Lord Welby and his two colleagues. It could have 
 been averted, as they pointed out, only by a form of Home 
 Rule giving financial independence to Ireland. But the 
 warning was older than the Report of the Financial Relations 
 Commission. Mr. Gladstone told the House of Commons in 
 1886, when introducing his Home Rule Bill, that no limit could 
 be set to Irish expenditure under the Union ; he and Sir William 
 Harcourt repeated the warning in 1893, and if the reader will 
 study the debates on the financial clauses of the Bill of 1893,* 
 he will find pages of bitter diatribe founded on the small net 
 contribution from Ireland to Imperial services for which the 
 revised financial scheme provided. Ireland, said the Opposi- 
 tion, was to make money out of Great Britain, and escape her 
 fair proportion of Imperial charges. Mr. Chamberlain showed 
 that, with allowance for payment from the Imperial purse of 
 part of the cost of Irish police, the net initial contribution was 
 about one-fortieth, and asked : "Is Irish patriotism a plant 
 of such sickly growth that it has to be watered with British 
 gold ?" The taunt was as pointless as it was cruel, for although 
 the Union had kept Ireland poor, Irish leaders, in spite of that 
 poverty, had asked for a financial independence which Mr. 
 Gladstone in neither of his Bills felt disposed to give her. 
 Mr. Chamberlain had his way ; the Union was maintained, 
 and as a result Ireland's actual contribution of two millions 
 at that date has been replaced by a subsidy from Great Britain. 
 Are we to be told now by Unionists that the Union must be 
 maintained in order to maintain this subsidy ? or by Home 
 Rulers that the Irish deficit is an argument for the perpetua- 
 tion of the financial dependence which caused it, and an 
 insuperable bar to the financial independence which alone 
 can extinguish it ? 
 
 No ; let us look the facts in the face. Here is a deficit 
 officially given as 1,312,000. It is probably less, owing to 
 an underestimate of Irish revenue. But it may grow to be 
 more, even with allowance for an automatic growth of revenue, 
 owing to the increased votes of the present year, and the 
 expenses peculiar to the establishment of the new Irish Legis- 
 lature and Government. What her really healthy and normal 
 * Hansard, July 21 and 25, 1893.
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 283 
 
 revenue should be only Ireland herself can discover in the future. 
 What her right expenditure should be she alone can determine. 
 We can only work upon the data we have before us. Economy 
 cannot be instantaneous, either hi Ireland or anywhere else. 
 Assume, then, an initial deficit in the Irish balance-sheet 
 on the basis of present taxation. Its exact size cannot 
 affect the manner of dealing with it. How are we to deal 
 with it ? 
 
 Let us dismiss at once the theory of " restitution " with 
 the earnest hope that we shall hear nothing of it in the 
 coming controversy. No Irishman will argue that a sub- 
 sidy to the extent of, or exceeding the deficit, is a good 
 thing in itself, and should be large and lasting because it will 
 represent compensation for money unfairly exacted in the 
 past. It is, indeed, true that the Union impoverished Ire- 
 land, but the most grievous wrong was moral, and for that 
 wrong alone is reparation possible. Home Rule is not worth 
 fighting for if it has not as its end and aim a self-reliant and 
 self-supporting Ireland. Nor does it improve the argument 
 in the least to represent the subsidy as productive expenditure 
 for the purpose of raising Ireland's taxable capacity and 
 improving her economic position. No money raised outside of 
 Ireland will have that effect. Once admit the principle of 
 restitution, and where are you to stop ? What rational or 
 scientific limit can be set to it ? More pertinent question 
 still, what are the conditions which will inevitably be imposed 
 in exchange ? Ireland cannot have it both ways. She must 
 either hold out for financial independence or, for every financial 
 boon, submit to a corresponding deduction from her political 
 liberty. 
 
 If there were no alternative between financial independence 
 without a farthing of temporary aid, and permanent financial 
 dependence with a permanent loss of liberty, it would pay 
 Ireland a thousandfold in the future to choose the former 
 scheme, remodel taxation promptly to meet the initial deficit, 
 and with equal promptitude set on foot such a drastic re- 
 duction of expenditure as would ensure the rapid attainment 
 of a proper financial equilibrium. When once the Irish 
 realized the issue, they would accept the responsibility with 
 all its attendant sacrifices, which would no doubt be severe.
 
 284 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 But there is an alternative, and that is to make good the 
 initial deficit, whatever the financial authorities finally pro- 
 nounce it to be, with an initial subsidy of equal size, or perhaps 
 of somewhat greater size so as to admit of a small initial surplus, 
 but destined to diminish by stated amounts, and within a few 
 years to terminate. To such assistance, given unconditionally, 
 Ireland has an unanswerable claim, and to such assistance 
 she ought, in my opinion, to limit her claim. Until two years 
 ago she contributed uninterruptedly, and sometimes exces- 
 sively, to the support of the Empire. With men and money 
 she has made efforts for the common weal which no self-govern- 
 ing Colony has made, though she has been treated, politically 
 and financially, as not even a Crown Colony has been treated. 
 Just at the point where the self-governing Colonies, thanks to 
 the liberty allowed them, are beginning to contribute indirectly 
 to the defence of the Empire, Ireland, as the ultimate result 
 of a century of coercive government, ceases to contribute. 
 She can claim honourably, if she wills, to be placed, by tem- 
 porary financial aid from the authority which is responsible for 
 her undoing, in the financial position of a self-governing Colony. 
 
 From the British point of view it is difficult to see any 
 valid objection to the course suggested. There will be no 
 stinginess in the settlement. Even if there were any dis- 
 position in that direction, it would be idle to grudge the initial 
 subsidy, because an equivalent sum is already being paid. 
 The Union will infallibly continue to accentuate the deficit 
 and increase the resulting burden on the taxpayers of Great 
 Britain. The plan proposed would eventually remove that 
 burden. But, obviously, its success hinges on the concession 
 of full financial powers to an Ireland unrepresented at West- 
 minster. In their own interests, if not for very shame, 
 Englishmen should decline to make use of the old adage, 
 that " he who pays the piper should call the tune." For more 
 than a century Ireland paid the piper and England called the 
 tune and what a tune, and with what results ! Representa- 
 tion has nothing to do with the case. Precedents are needless, 
 but there are, as a fact, many. Crown Colonies have fre- 
 quently received free grants for the relief of distress Jamaica 
 and other West Indian islands, for example. The Transvaal 
 and Orange River Colony received several millions after the war
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 285 
 
 to enable the ruined farmers to start business on a footing of 
 solvency. During the whole period of their adolescence, and, 
 indeed, until quite a recent date, all the self-governing Colonies 
 were virtually subsidized by the allocation of British forces 
 for local defence, maintained at the Imperial charge. And 
 Ireland paid her share of this charge. Similar garrisons were, 
 are, and will be, maintained in Ireland. Yes, but Ireland 
 contributed to their cost, and in course of time will, it is to be 
 hoped, resume her contributions with a gladder heart and a 
 freer conscience than ever before. 
 
 Canada was economically stagnant under coercion. If, in 
 her case, we had carried coercion as far as we carried it in 
 Ireland, it would have been necessary to give her a temporary 
 subsidy in order to enable her to assume the position of a 
 self-governing Colony. Ireland's proximity does not alter 
 economic laws. " Facts are stubborn things," and these are 
 the Irish facts. Duty apart, no more profitable investment 
 could possibly be made by the British tax-payer than a 
 subsidy designed to enable Ireland to stand on her legs again. 
 The present tribute to her is a dead loss. 
 
 The subsidy, if given, ought, I submit, on no account to be 
 earmarked, on the bad precedent set by the Bills of 1886 and 
 1893,* for any particular head of expenditure in Ireland, as 
 for Police, Pensions, Land Commission, or Education. As I 
 have shown previously, nothing is easier than to pick out items 
 of excessive expenditure, or of under-expenditure, for which 
 Ireland is not herself responsible. But to allocate a grant 
 specially to any of these purposes would be superfluous unless 
 the intention were to maintain Imperial control over the 
 service in question. As I urged in Chapter X., none of the 
 services mentioned above ought to be retained under Imperial 
 control. Extravagance in the first three will not be properly 
 checked, save by a responsible Ireland. Nor will extra money 
 on Education be properly spent until it is raised and spent 
 by Ireland. There are no other services, with the possible 
 exception of Posts, to which a subsidy could possibly be 
 applicable. Even in that case an earmarked subsidy would 
 be out of place. But Posts are outside the point we are 
 
 * Both Bills provided for part payment of the cost of Irish Police from 
 Imperial funds.
 
 286 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 discussing. If for mutual convenience they were to be kept 
 under Imperial control a step which would not render im- 
 perative Irish representation at Westminster their finance 
 would remain, as at present, common to the whole United 
 Kingdom. There is officially held, on bad evidence, to be a 
 loss on Irish Posts of 249,000, and this loss is debited against 
 Ireland, and goes to swell the deficit we have been considering. 
 With the Posts under Imperial control, the initial deficit to be 
 made good by subsidy would be reduced by the amount of the 
 loss. Should it, however, be decided that Ireland is fairly 
 entitled to a share of the large general profit earned by the 
 Postal Services of the United Kingdom, the annual profit so 
 attributable to Ireland would be set off against the annual 
 subsidy as long as the subsidy lasted, and after it was at an 
 end would be a clear item of revenue to Ireland. My own 
 opinion, as I stated hi Chapter X., is that the Irish postal 
 system, whether standing by itself it shows a profit or a loss, 
 ought to be under Irish control. 
 
 III. 
 FUTURE CONTRIBUTION TO IMPERIAL SERVICES. 
 
 This must be left a voluntary matter for Ireland, as it is 
 for the self-governing Colonies. There is no contribution 
 from Ireland at present, and to fix a future date at which a 
 fixed contribution, like that from the Isle of Man, should begin, 
 is a course hardly practicable even if it were desirable. 
 
 IV. 
 IRELAND'S SHARE OF THE NATIONAL DEBT. 
 
 Until two years ago Ireland, of course, contributed, inter 
 alia, to the annual interest and sinking fund, amounting in 
 1910-11 to 24,554,000, on the National Debt of the United 
 Kingdom. It is impossible to estimate her share of the 
 capital of the Debt, and I scarcely think that anyone would 
 seriously propose to encumber the new Ireland with an old 
 Debt, based on some arbitrary estimate. For the great bulk
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 287 
 
 of Debt created in the past she has little moral responsi- 
 bility no more, at any rate, than the self-governing Colonies. 
 In this respect she must begin, like them, with a clean sheet. 
 
 V. 
 IRELAND'S SHARE OF IMPERIAL MISCELLANEOUS REVENUE. 
 
 On the other hand, Ireland, in consideration of the remis- 
 sions mentioned, must renounce the share to which she is 
 technically entitled of the Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue, 
 derived mainly from Suez Canal shares and the Mint, and 
 amounting altogether in 1910-11 to 2,769,500.* 
 
 VI. 
 IRISH CONTROL OF CUSTOMS AND EXCISE. 
 
 Let us now come to close quarters with this important issue. 
 The grand argument on the affirmative side is that the pro- 
 ducts of these duties represent nearly four-fifths of the tax 
 revenue collected in Ireland. What are the objections ? 
 
 We need scarcely consider the general objection, sometimes 
 made ostensibly in the interests of Ireland, that her public 
 men have little financial experience. The fact is true, and 
 it is not their fault. But the financial scheme cannot reason- 
 ably be based on a recognition of a temporary lack of ex- 
 perience. 
 
 I place Customs and Excise together because I believe there 
 is no serious question of making a distinction between the 
 two, and of allowing Ireland to levy and collect her own Excise 
 duties, while denying her authority over Customs. It is true 
 that until 1860 such a distinction was made, and a lower 
 Excise duty levied upon Irish than upon British spirits ;f but 
 the tendency in aU modern States is to make the authority 
 over Customs the same as that over Excise, and any departure 
 from that principle, in the case of modern Ireland, is likely to 
 cause considerable inconvenience. License Duties, which are 
 included under the head of Excise, may, no doubt, without 
 much inconvenience, be differentiated from the rest, but their 
 Irish proceeds (284,000) are too small to influence the question. 
 
 * Return No. 220. t See p. 234.
 
 288 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Excise, then, follows Customs. What are the objections to 
 giving Ireland, like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, 
 control over her own Customs ? Without doubt, the establish- 
 ment of a new Customs barrier between Ireland and Great 
 Britain is in itself a drawback. The Custom-house machinery 
 exists, of course, at present, because Ireland is an island ; nor 
 would the additional function of checking British as well 
 as foreign imports into Ireland cause any great increase of 
 expense ; but since the great bulk of Irish external trade is 
 with Great Britain, there will unquestionably be a certain 
 amount of inconvenience and expense both to Ireland and 
 Great Britain ha submitting merchandise on both sides of the 
 Irish Channel to the passage of a Customs barrier. 
 
 That seems to be the limit to which criticism can justly go 
 in the case of Ireland and Great Britain. That is as far as it 
 goes in the analogous case of New Zealand and the Australian 
 Commonwealth, where a small island State has a separate Cus- 
 toms system from that of a large, wealthy, and populous neigh- 
 bour of the same race, and with many identical interests. That 
 is as far as it goes hi the parallel case of little Newfoundland 
 and the great Dominion of Canada. Neither the Dominion nor 
 the Commonwealth claim that proximity, power, and racial 
 identity give them the right to control the trade and taxation 
 of their small independent neighbours, nor does the smallest 
 friction result from the mutual independence. On the con- 
 trary, both the Dominions and the Commonwealth were 
 founded on that vital principle of a pre-existent State in- 
 dependence surrendered voluntarily for larger ends. The 
 whole Empire depends on the principle of local autonomy, and, 
 above all, on the principle of local financial autonomy. En- 
 deavours in America to sustain the opposite theory led to 
 disaster. We have for generations regarded it as perfectly 
 natural that the self-governing Colonies should have Customs 
 systems of their own, even when they are used for the purpose 
 of imposing heavy duties on goods coming from the Mother 
 Country, and we know that that liberty has borne fruit a hun- 
 dredfold in affection and loyalty to the Imperial Government. 
 Until the Union of Great Britain and Ireland it was regarded 
 as equally natural that Ireland should have control of her own 
 Customs, along with all other branches of revenue. Even after
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 289 
 
 the Union, although there was no Irish control over anything 
 Irish, it was recognized, until the fiscal unification of the two 
 countries in 1817, that Irish conditions required a separate 
 Customs system, which, in fact, existed until 1826.* How 
 fiscal unification and the subsequent abolition of separate 
 Customs was brought about I have told in Chapter XI. 
 It is not a pleasant story. To say the least, the conditions, 
 moral and material, were not such as to warrant the inference 
 that there is any inherent necessity for joint Customs between 
 Ireland and Great Britain. The presumption raised by all 
 subsequent events is in the opposite direction. 
 
 But the tradition of unified Customs, now nearly a century 
 old, has immense potency, and unless it is fearlessly scrutinized 
 and challenged, may be able, reinforced by the passions 
 excited by the great controversy over Free Trade and Protec- 
 tion, to defy the warnings writ large upon the page of history. 
 The tradition must be so challenged. Say what we will about 
 the proximity of Ireland and Great Britain, descant as we will 
 in law-books, pamphlets, leading articles, debates, on what 
 ought theoretically to be the fiscal relations of the two countries, 
 we cannot escape from the fact that, in this as in so many other 
 respects, both the human and economic problem before us is 
 fundamentally a colonial problem, and that its being so is 
 not the fault of Ireland, but of Great Britain. 
 
 Belief hi Home Rule seems to me necessarily to involve a 
 willingness to give Ireland her Customs. Great Britain has 
 no moral right to lay it down that her views about trade shall 
 govern the course of Irish policy ; and if Great Britain believes 
 sincerely in Home Rule, she should be willing to trust Ireland, 
 regardless of the economic consequences, and regardless of the 
 effect upon the great Tariff controversy. 
 
 The effect upon that controversy I shall not discuss. It 
 seems to me to possess only a tactical and electioneering 
 interest, and that side of the Home Rule problem I have rigidly 
 avoided, while expressing in general terms my belief that sound 
 policy and sound tactics in reality coincide. The Home Rule 
 Bill is far more likely to be wrecked by timidity than by bold- 
 ness, by precautions and compromises than by a fearless 
 accommodation of British policy to Irish facts and needs. 
 
 As to the danger to Great Britain of separate Irish Customs, 
 
 * See p. 234. 
 
 19
 
 290 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 it seems to me to be greatly exaggerated. Ireland's own 
 interests will primarily dictate her action. What she will 
 decide her interest to be, nobody can foretell with certainty 
 beyond a limited point, because Irish public opinion is not 
 formed. Ireland has taken little or no part in the fiscal con- 
 troversy, for the simple reason that she has been absorbed in 
 the task of getting Home Rule, and until she gets it she is 
 precluded from formulating a trustworthy national opinion on 
 most of the great subjects which agitate modern societies. 
 There is, however, no tradition in favour of high Protection, 
 even from Grattan's commercially free Parliament. The ques- 
 tion of a low protective or purely revenue tariff on imports 
 has not received any serious investigation. Let us frankly 
 admit at the outset that no country hi the world, economically 
 situated as Ireland is, dispenses with a general tariff of some 
 sort, and undoubtedly there are to-day a good many Irish- 
 men outside political life who advocate the encouragement 
 of infant Irish manufacturing industries by sufficient pro- 
 tective duties directed against Great Britain as well as against 
 the outside world. It would be strange if there were not, in 
 view of the distressing past history of Ireland's throttled 
 industries, and in view of the strenuous efforts now being made 
 by the Development Associations to push the manufacture and 
 sale of Irish goods in all parts of the world. There are many 
 avowed Free Traders also ; nor are the Development Associa- 
 tions themselves officially protectionist. The opinion is 
 sometimes expressed that Ireland, which could easily be self- 
 supporting in the matter of food, occupies an unhealthy posi- 
 tion in exporting a large proportion of her own agricultural 
 produce, butter, bacon, meat, etc., and in importing for her 
 own consumption inferior British and foreign qualities of some 
 of the principal foodstuffs ; but, so far as it is possible to 
 ascertain it, the predominant opinion seems to be that an 
 agricultural tariff would not be a good remedy for this weak- 
 ness, if it be one, and that Ireland's future development, like 
 that of Denmark, lies in the increasingly scientific organization 
 of her agricultural industries, and in the better cultivation of her 
 own soil. " Better farming, better business, better living," to 
 use the admirable motto invented by Sir Horace Plunkett for 
 the I.A.O.S. In the absence of an Irish Legislature, no special
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 291 
 
 importance can be attached to individual expressions of opinion. 
 Yet a measure of prophecy is permissible. The Irish Legisla- 
 ture will have to study the national interest, and it is possible 
 to say with certainty at least this that Ireland's interest lies 
 in maintaining close and friendly trade relations with Great 
 Britain. Unfortunately, we have no means of accurately 
 ascertaining the amount of trade done by Ireland with Great 
 Britain and with foreign and colonial countries respectively. 
 Irish commerce takes, of course, three forms : (a) Direct trade 
 with countries outside Great Britain ; (6) indirect trade with 
 these countries via Great Britain ; (c) direct local trade with 
 Great Britain. The statisticians of the Irish Department 
 of Agriculture make only an imperfect attempt to distinguish 
 between these classes, but their figures, so far as they go, 
 prove beyond question that the great bulk of Irish external 
 commerce belongs to Class (c) local trade with Great 
 Britain. The total value of Irish trade in 1909 is estimated 
 at 125,675,847, of which 63,947,155 was for imports, 
 61,728,692 for exports. Probably 80 per cent., at least, of 
 this trade was strictly local. Certainly Great Britain is the 
 market for very nearly the whole of Irish agricultural produce, 
 and for most of her exports of linen, ships, tobacco, liquor, 
 etc. Any aggressive action likely to provoke a tariff war 
 would be ruinous to Ireland, while it would hurt Great Britain 
 far less in proportion. But, in fact, both countries would 
 suffer, Great Britain from the loss of an easily accessible food- 
 supply of extraordinary value, not only for economic, but for 
 strategical reasons ; Ireland from the loss of an excellent and 
 indispensable customer. 
 
 On the other hand, whatever Ireland's trade policy may be, 
 she certainly needs the power of fixing her own duties upon 
 commodities like tea and sugar, which are of foreign origin, 
 and are now merely transported to her through British ports. 
 Taxation of this sort is a matter of the deepest concern to a 
 country where agricultural wages average only eleven shillings 
 a week, and which cannot reduce its exorbitant Old Age Pen- 
 sions Bill without giving some compensatory relief to the classes 
 concerned. Tobacco, of which in its manufactured forms 
 Ireland is a considerable producer as well as a large consumer, 
 belongs to the same category. Liquor is an important article
 
 292 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of production in Ireland, as well as of consumption, and the 
 Irish Legislature ought to be able to form and carry out its 
 own liquor policy. Ireland is just as able and willing to pro- 
 mote temperance as Great Britain, and just as competent to 
 reconcile a temperance policy with due regard to producing and 
 distributing interests. 
 
 The Customs tariff is an Irish question, not an Ulster 
 question. The interests of the Protestant farmers of North- 
 East Ulster are identical with those of the rest of Ireland, and 
 obviously it will be a matter of the profoundest importance for 
 Ireland as a whole to safeguard the interests of the ship- 
 building and linen industries in the North in whatever way may 
 seem best. The Industrial Development Associations, which 
 are affiliated in a national organization, and are far above petty 
 sectarian jealousies, may be trusted to see that Ireland steers 
 a safe financial course in her trade policy. 
 
 If there is little or no danger that a Home-Ruled Ireland will 
 commit tariff follies of her own, she has unquestionably a right 
 to escape from further entanglement in the tariff policy of 
 Great Britain. What may be the issue of Great Britain's 
 great fiscal controversy nobody can foretell. But as long as a 
 protective tariff remains the cardinal point in the constructive 
 policy of one of the British parties, there is a strong likelihood 
 of such a tariff, which would be uniform for the whole United 
 Kingdom, being carried into law. Free Traders, like myself, 
 may deplore the possibility, but we cannot shut our eyes to it. 
 That tariff, if and when it is framed, will, like the Free Trade 
 tariff of the past, be framed without regard to Irish interests, 
 which are predominantly agricultural, and with exclusive 
 regard to British interests, which are mainly industrial. What- 
 ever may have been the original ideal of the Conservative 
 Protectionists, however highly they may once have valued the 
 protection of agriculture, irresistible political forces have 
 driven them in the direction of a tariff framed mainly to secure 
 the adhesion of the great manufacturing towns. The electoral 
 power of these towns, the growing resentment of the working 
 classes in most parts of the world at the increasing cost of 
 living, the fact that Great Britain cannot under any con- 
 ceivable circumstances feed her own population, have been 
 reflected in the definite abandonment by the party leaders of
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 293 
 
 the proposed small duty against colonial imports, and in the 
 admission by Mr. Bonar Law at Manchester, during the last 
 General Election, that the proposed tariff would not benefit 
 the farmers. Nor will the failure of the Reciprocity Agree- 
 ment between Canada and the United States appreciably 
 diminish the obstacles to food-taxes hi the United Kingdom. 
 Any practicable protective tariff, therefore, on the ground 
 of its injustice to Ireland, would cause strong and legitimate 
 resentment in that country, which is subjected to the most 
 formidable competition from foreign and colonial foodstuffs, 
 but whose great competitior in manufactured goods is Great 
 Britain herself. The one Irish industry which might favour 
 it is the linen industry of the North. It would have no attrac- 
 tion for the shipbuilding industry, which in no part of the 
 British Isles has anything to gain by Protection, as I believe 
 all parties to the controversy agree. Other small manufac- 
 turing industries would complain that they gained nothing ; 
 while the agricultural population would complain that, as 
 consumers, they would be damaged by higher prices for 
 clothing and other manufactured articles, while as producers 
 they were ignored. 
 
 The difficulty is only one further proof of the dissimilarity of 
 economic conditions between Great Britain and Ireland, and 
 of the artificial and unnatural character of the present fiscal 
 union. Justice to Ireland demands its dissolution. The 
 dangers are imaginary. Liberals, however firm their belief 
 in Free Trade, should hold, with Lord Welby and his Home 
 Rule colleagues on the Financial Relations Commission, that 
 " even if Ireland initiates a protective policy, hi this case, as 
 in that of the Colonies, freedom is a greater good than Free 
 Trade." As for the Protectionists, I have never seen an argu- 
 ment from that source, and I do not see how any consistent 
 or plausible argument could possibly be framed, to show that a 
 uniform tariff for the United Kingdom could be fair to Ireland. 
 Professor He wins, the leading Tariff Reform economist, 
 virtually acknowledges the impossibility in his Introduction 
 to Miss Murray's " Commercial Relations between England 
 and Ireland." There were two sound lines of policy, he points 
 out, which might have been adopted towards Ireland in the 
 period prior to the Union : (1) To have placed her on a level
 
 294 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 of equality with the Colonies, applying the mercantile system 
 indiscriminately and impartially to the Colonies and to her ; 
 or (2) to have aimed from the first at the financial and com- 
 mercial unity of the British Isles. Neither of these courses 
 was taken. Ireland, while kept financially and commercially 
 separate, " was in a less favourable position than that of a 
 Colony." With regard to the present, " Most of the diffi- 
 culties of an economic character," says the Professor, " hi the 
 financial relations between England and Ireland, arise from 
 the differences of economic structure and organization between 
 the two countries. If Ireland were a highly organized, 
 populous, manufacturing country, the present fiscal system 
 would probably work out no worse than it does in the urban 
 districts of Great Britain. But whatever be the virtues or 
 demerits of that system, it was certainly not framed with any 
 reference to the economic conditions which prevail in Ireland." 
 We wait for the seemingly unavoidable political inference, but 
 in vain. Professor Hewins is a Unionist. "A ' national ' 
 policy for Ireland ... is never likely to be possible." Well, 
 that is plain speaking, and the more plainly these things are 
 said the better. Let Unionists, if they will, tell Ireland 
 frankly that she must eternally suffer for the Union, but let 
 them not pretend, as they do pretend, that Ireland profits by 
 the Union. 
 
 VII. 
 FEDERAL FINANCE. 
 
 Directly we leave the simple path of financial independence, 
 and endeavour to construct schemes which on the one hand 
 disguise the financial difficulties of Ireland, and on the other 
 provide for Imperial control of Irish Customs and Excise, 
 we involve ourselves in a tangle of difficulties. A brief ex- 
 amination of these schemes will throw into still stronger relief 
 the merits of the simpler solution. 
 
 First of all, let us dispose finally of the Federal analogy. 
 In Chapter X. I showed that the framework of Home Rule 
 cannot be Federal, because the conditions of Federation do 
 not exist in the United Kingdom. One of the invariable 
 features of a Federation is the Federal control of Customs and
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 295 
 
 Excise, but I pointed out that an equally invariable condition 
 precedent to Federation was the willingness on the part of 
 a self-supporting State, previously possessing complete finan- 
 cial independence, to abandon its individual control over 
 this realm of taxation to a Federal Government of its own 
 choosing,* and that no such condition existed in the case of 
 Ireland. But some features of Federal finance undoubtedly 
 may be made to show a superficial analogy to Anglo-Irish 
 conditions, and may therefore have an attraction for those 
 who shrink from giving Ireland financial independence. In 
 the first place, it is possible to find Federal precedents for the 
 payment out of the common purse of certain large items of 
 Irish expenditure. There is no precedent for the payment of 
 Police, but Old Age Pensions, for example, are paid in Australia 
 by the Commonwealth, not by the States. The chief point 
 of interest, however, is the mechanism of Federal finance. 
 The Australian and Canadian Federations are the only two 
 which suggest even a remote parallel. There the subordinate 
 States are actually "subsidized" by regular annual payments 
 out of Federal revenues, mainly derived from Customs and 
 Excise, and in the case of Australia, as I observed at p. 245, 
 the process at present entails an elaborate system of book- 
 keeping to distinguish between the "collected" and "true" 
 revenue of the several States, similar in kind to the calculations 
 now made by the Treasury for ascertaining the " collected " 
 and " true " revenue derived from Ireland, Scotland, and 
 England, f 
 
 In Australia this system of bookkeeping is discredited, 
 although the recent attempt by a Commonwealth Referendum 
 to abolish both it and the financial system of which it forms a 
 part just failed. It is to be hoped that, whatever financial 
 scheme is adopted for Ireland, this bad colonial precedent, 
 together with the precedent of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, 
 will not be made pretexts for perpetuating a system whose 
 defects are so glaring, and which is a source of continual dis- 
 satisfaction to Ireland. If Irish Customs and Excise are to 
 
 * I need scarcely point out that the newly- created Provinces of the 
 Dominion of Canada are exceptions to this rule. But there is no analogy 
 with Ireland. Such Provinces are carved out of newly settled public territory 
 a nd given local government. 
 
 t See pp. 244-245, and 277-278,
 
 296 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 be outside Irish control, while their proceeds are to be credited 
 to Ireland, let her whole collected revenue from those sources 
 be credited to her, in spite of the excessive allocation that step 
 would involve. 
 
 Apart from this point of similarity in mechanism, the 
 Australian and Canadian subsidies to the States and Pro- 
 vinces respectively are of no value as models for a Home Rule 
 Bill. Let us examine the case of Australia. There the Com- 
 monwealth, besides having exclusive control of Customs and 
 Excise, has general powers of taxation concurrently with the 
 States, though in practice Commonwealth taxation is almost 
 entirely confined to Customs and Excise. All surplus Com- 
 monwealth revenue is, by the present law, returnable to the 
 States, and the total annual amount so returned must not be 
 less than three-fourths of the total proceeds of Customs and 
 Excise ; so large are these proceeds, and so small, relatively, 
 the expenses of the Commonwealth Government.* Here at the 
 outset is a feature which places Australian Federal Finance in 
 an altogether different category to that of the United Kingdom, 
 where only 47-6 per cent, of the revenue is from Customs 
 and Excise. Nor are the distributions of surplus revenue to 
 the States really " subsidies," even in the case of the poorest 
 States, but repayments, on a method laid down in the Constitu- 
 tion, of that part of the State contribution to Federal services 
 which the Federal Government does not want. Here the 
 system of bookkeeping is of some service to us, because it 
 reveals, approximately, at any rate, both the contribution and 
 the actual repayment, which is based on a calculation of the 
 amount saved to the State by the transference of certain 
 departments to the Federal Government, set off by a per 
 capita charge for new Federal expenditure, as, for example, 
 for Old Age Pensions (see Table on p. 297). 
 
 The great bulk of the tax revenue shown comes, as I have 
 said, from Customs and Excise, and it is unnecessary to set 
 out the respective figures of revenue derived from these duties. f 
 
 * Until two years ago even the remaining one-fourth, added to other small 
 items of Commonwealth revenue, was too large for the expenditure, and a 
 part of it was returned annually to the States. 
 
 f The other principal source of revenue is from Posts, but that is almost 
 exactly balanced by expenditure, so that it barely affects the amount of the 
 repayment to the States.
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 297 
 
 It will be seen, after deducting repayments from contributions, 
 that even the poorest States make a substantial net contribu- 
 tion to Federal purposes. On the other hand, the relative 
 proportion of revenue contributed by Western Australia and 
 Tasmania is diminishing. In Western Australia it was 
 12-49 per cent, of the whole in 1905, 8-13 per cent, of the whole 
 in 1909. In the same period, not only relatively, but actually, 
 the gross contribution of Western Australia has diminished 
 from 1,431,624 in 1905 to 1,166,126 in 1909, while the 
 repayment to her has also diminished from 1,031,223 in 1905 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS OF, AND REPAYMENTS TO, THE STATES OF THE AUSTRALIAN 
 COMMONWEALTH, 1908-09.* 
 
 
 Contributions to 
 Revenue. 
 
 Repayments from 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 New South Wales 
 
 
 
 5 621 958 
 
 
 
 3,326,276 
 
 Victoria 
 
 3,750,161 
 
 1,987,435 
 
 Queensland 
 
 1 989 540 
 
 1,027,047 
 
 South Australia 
 
 1,307,621 
 
 716,957 
 
 Western Australia 
 
 1,166,126 
 
 627,933 
 
 Tasmania 
 
 515,387 
 
 244,747 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total Common- 
 wealth Revenue. 
 
 Total 
 Repayments. 
 
 
 14,350,793 
 
 7,930,395 
 
 to 627,933. Tasmania's repayment is also diminishing, 
 though her gross contribution has increased. These circum- 
 stances suggest a slight resemblance to the growing dispropor- 
 tion between the resources of Ireland and Great Britain, but 
 they do not assist us towards a solution of the Irish problem. 
 Each Australian State, while contributing the whole of its 
 Customs and Excise to the Federal Government, receives back 
 at least half, and in some cases two-thirds,! and adds that sum 
 to its own independent revenue for the maintenance of the 
 
 * These figures are taken from the Official Year-Book of the Common- 
 wealth of Australia, No. 3, 1901-1909. 
 
 f It must be understood that the law requiring three-quarters of the 
 Commonwealth revenue from Customs and Excise to be returned to the 
 States does not imply that each State should have three-quarters of its con- 
 tribution returned, but that the total amount returned should be at least 
 three-quarters.
 
 298 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 State Government. The sum refunded amounts on the average 
 to a little below a quarter of the total State revenue to be 
 accurate, 23-01 per cent. Of the remaining 76-99 per cent., 
 only 10 per cent, on the average is derived from direct taxa- 
 tion ; 10-10 per cent, from public lands, 4-15 per cent, from 
 miscellaneous services, and no less than 52-55 per cent, from 
 Public Works railways, tramways, harbours, etc. 
 
 Here are the details of revenue for 1908-1909 in the richest 
 and the poorest State, respectively : 
 
 Particulars. 
 
 New South 
 Wales. 
 
 Tasmania. 
 
 Eefunded by the Commonwealth 
 Taxation (direct) 
 
 
 
 3,377,213 
 907,249 
 
 
 232,842 
 250,835 
 
 Public Works and Services 
 Land 
 
 7,309,062 
 1 778 002 
 
 329,192 
 96,519 
 
 Miscellaneous ... 
 
 274600 
 
 25,017 
 
 
 
 
 Totals... 
 
 13 646 126 
 
 934,405 
 
 
 
 
 Now, Ireland raises no public revenues at all from Public 
 Works, only 24,500 out of a total of ten millions from public 
 lands ; while 29-25 per cent, of her " true " tax revenue comes 
 from direct taxation and 70-75 per cent, from Customs and 
 Excise. To take away even a third of her receipts from Customs 
 and Excise would be to leave her with a deficit of three millions 
 and a half, which would have to be made up by additions to 
 a direct taxation, which is already vastly higher than in any 
 part of Australia. She needs every penny of her revenue 
 from whatever source derived, and there is no possibility of 
 extracting from her a contribution to Imperial services, unless 
 it be an illusory contribution based on faked figures. 
 
 The real moral to be derived from the Australian comparison 
 is that both Australia and Ireland are countries where accumu- 
 lated wealth is comparatively small, and where the impor- 
 tance of indirect taxation is very great. All the more reason 
 for giving Ireland control of her own indirect taxation . Canada, 
 and, indeed, all the self-governing Colonies, suggest the same 
 moral. In Canada the Federal or Dominion Parliament has 
 an unlimited power of taxation, the Provinces being vested 
 only with the concurrent right of direct taxation within their
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 299 
 
 respective borders (B. N. America Act, Clauses 91 and 92). 
 In practice, nearly the whole Federal tax revenue is derived 
 from Customs and Excise. We have no materials for a com- 
 parison of gross and net provincial contributions, because no 
 records are compiled. Under an Act of 1907, revising the 
 former arrangements, two small subsidies, forming a fixed 
 charge on the gross Federal revenue, and bearing no specific 
 proportion to the income from Customs and Excise, are given 
 to each Province. 
 
 1. A subsidy (from 20,000 to 40,000) based on the total 
 provincial population. 
 
 2. A payment of 80 cents per head of the provincial popula- 
 tion. 
 
 Both together are very small by comparison with the 
 Australian payments. Neither is really a subsidy, though it is 
 given that name, but the return of a surplus indirectly con- 
 tributed. It is, indeed, conceivable that a new and poor 
 Province might actually contribute less than she received 
 back. One Province, British Columbia, having long com- 
 plained that she contributed far more than her share, and 
 received back too little, obtained an exceptional grant of 
 20,000 under the Act of 1907.* The sums raised indepen- 
 dently in each Province for the support of the provincial 
 administration are, as in Australia, derived to a very slight 
 extent from direct taxation, and to a very large extent from 
 public property ; not, as in Australia, from railways, tramways, 
 etc., but mainly from vast tracts of public land. In this 
 respect the Provinces resemble the Dominion, which derives a 
 large revenue from the same source. 
 
 In three vital points, then, Anglo-Irish finance differs from 
 that of the Colonial Federations. Ireland's whole net income 
 comes from taxes ; she needs it all ; and her economic condi- 
 tions are totally different from those of Great Britain. So far 
 from borrowing anything from Federal finance, we should 
 deduce from it the moral of financial independence for Ireland. 
 With all the powerful centripetal forces, moral and material, 
 which originally united, and now hold together, the federated 
 States of Australia and Canada, there is continual controversy, 
 and sometimes considerable friction, over finance, generally 
 in connection with the position of the poorer Provinces or 
 
 * See p. 244.
 
 300 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 States. Some problems are still unsolved. Good authorities, 
 among them Sit- Arthur Bourinot, think that the Canadian 
 subsidies are unsound. Australia is dissatisfied with her 
 system. The American States, while giving up Customs and 
 Excise, are self-supporting entities ; but that system has 
 its drawback, in Federal extravagance. We must remember, 
 too, that even if these examples were of any use to us, the 
 weak States or Provinces in a Federation have a greater control 
 over Federal financial policy than Ireland could have under 
 any scheme which reserved Customs and Excise to the Im- 
 perial Parliament ; because the Federal principle, partially 
 infringed only in the case of Canada, is to give them dispro- 
 portionately high representation in the Upper Federal chamber, 
 which can reject money Bills.* 
 
 On all counts, Ireland's position is that of a country which 
 imperatively needs fiscal isolation similar to that enjoyed by 
 States prior to Federation, before it can dream of embarking 
 on the perilous sea of quasi-Federal finance. Trouble enough 
 comes from the present joint system. We should make a clean 
 sweep of it, permit Ireland, with a minimum of temporary 
 assistance, to find her own financial equilibrium, and so lay 
 the foundation, perhaps, for a genuine Federation in the future. 
 
 VIII. 
 ALTERNATIVE SCHEMES OF HOME RULE FINANCED 
 
 Historically, these fall into two classes ; though, as I shall 
 show, they are for all intents and purposes merged in one 
 to-day. 
 
 The two classes are (1) The Gladstonian ; (2) the "Con- 
 tract." 
 
 1. Mr. Gladstone's Schemes. It is unnecessary to examine 
 these in close detail, though, if the reader cares to do so, he 
 will find details set forth in the Appendix. Four outstand- 
 ing features were common to the schemes both of 1886 and 
 1893 : (a) Permanent Imperial control over the imposition of 
 Customs and Excise ; (6) Irish control over all other taxation ; 
 
 * Except perhaps in the case of Canada. 
 
 j- The Author is indebted, here and elsewhere, to papers by Messrs. C. E. 
 Buxton, F. MacDerinot, and R. C. Phillimore, in " Home Rule Problems."
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 301 
 
 (c) an annual Irish contribution to Imperial expenditure ; 
 
 (d) Imperial payment of part cost of the Irish Police. 
 
 With regard to (a), the most important point of difference 
 in the two Bills was that under the first Ireland was credited 
 with her whole " collected " revenue from Customs and Excise, 
 under the second (as amended) with only her "true " revenue, 
 which was less than the former by 1,700,000. Another 
 point in which the two Bills differed was the permission to 
 Ireland, under the Bill of 1893, after six years, to collect her 
 own Excise. Both imposition and collection were wholly 
 reserved under the Bill of 1886. I have already given grounds 
 for the impolicy of retaining control over Customs and Excise. 
 Let me only ask the reader, in conclusion, to figure the situa- 
 tion. How could Ireland frame a financial policy ? Three- 
 quarters of the revenue, as at present levied, of a country pro- 
 foundly dissimilar economically from Great Britain, and in 
 need of drastic reforms of expenditure and marked changes in 
 taxation, would be permanently outside the reach of an Irish 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, in spite of the representa- 
 tion at Westminster which Imperial control would entail, 
 would in the long-run fluctuate according to British needs and 
 notions. In the long-run, I repeat ; but incidentally there 
 would be sharp and damaging conflicts. Occasions might 
 occur like that of 1909, when the majority of Irishmen, rightly 
 or wrongly, resented the form of new taxation, and would have 
 secured the rejection of the Budget had not that step been 
 hurtful to the prospects of Home Rule. It will be useless 
 to blame either Ireland or Great Britain. Every country is 
 bound to study its own circumstances. A similar crisis would 
 have imperilled even the strongest Federation. We are not in 
 the least concerned at the moment with the goodness or bad- 
 ness of that famous Budget. We are concerned with the effect 
 on the relations of the two countries, and with the indefeasible 
 right of Ireland and Great Britain to do what they consider 
 best for their own interests. 
 
 With regard to (6), the Bill of 1893 differed from that of 
 1886 in the provision of a suspensory period of six years, 
 during which all existing taxation in Ireland was to be under 
 Imperial control, though Ireland could impose additional taxes 
 of her own. After six years and, under the Bill of 1886, 
 from the outset Ireland was to have control over all taxation
 
 302 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 other than Customs and Excise. Where is the wisdom in 
 selecting direct taxation as peculiarly suitable to Irish control ? 
 It is already higher in Ireland than in any country economically 
 situated as Ireland is. Yet Ireland's power to reduce it will 
 be very small and very difficult to use, if she is rigidly excluded 
 from changes in the indirect taxation which presses mainly on 
 the poor. Would she naturally be inclined to increase direct 
 taxation ? Land Value Duties produce next to nothing in 
 Ireland, and their extension would be unpopular. The 
 existing rates of Income-Tax and Estate Duties cannot be 
 raised, though their incidence might be extended to cover 
 poorer elements of the population, as, for example, the small 
 farmers. That is a kind of measure which the farmers would, 
 if necessary, willingly agree to, in order to balance the 
 accounts of a financially independent Ireland, but it is not 
 the kind of measure they would care about when their 
 national finance was dictated by Great Britain. If one cared 
 to make a dialectical point, one could add that a common 
 argument against Home Rule is a fear of oppressive taxation 
 of the rich or oppressive taxation of North-East Ulster, 
 at the hands of an Irish Parliament, through high direct 
 imposts. The fear is one of those which scarcely need serious 
 discussion. If Irish statesmen were as black as their most 
 industrious traducers paint them, they could not by any in- 
 genuity invent any new direct tax which would not hit all the 
 provinces equally, saving perhaps a tax on pasture ranches, 
 which would hit North-East Ulster least ; while super-taxes 
 on the exceptionally rich, if they were worth the trouble of 
 collecting, would drive wealth out of a poor country at the 
 very moment when it was most urgently necessary to gain the 
 confidence of investors and the few wealthy residents. 
 
 With regard to (c), Mr. Gladstone's various devices for 
 obtaining from Ireland a contribution to Imperial services 
 possess now only a melancholy and academical interest, be- 
 cause, without an elaborate manipulation of the accounts, so 
 as to disguise their true significance, no such contribution can 
 possibly be obtained. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone provided for an 
 annual payment from Ireland, fixed in amount for thirty years ; 
 in 1893 for the contribution of a quota namely, one-third of 
 her " true " annual revenue from Imperial taxes, to run for 
 six years, and then to be revised. His calculations were
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 303 
 
 conditioned to some extent by (d), the part payment from 
 the Imperial purse of the cost of Irish Police, coupled, 
 of course, with continued Imperial control of that Police, 
 pending its replacement by a new civil force. It is easy enough 
 in ways like this to show a balance in Ireland's favour, and, 
 at the same time, to cripple the responsibility of the Irish 
 Legislature by transferring selected services from the Irish to 
 the Imperial side of the account. We can extend the process 
 to Old Age Pensions, the Land Commission, and what not. As 
 I have repeatedly urged, this course is radically unsound. As 
 for the Police, there can be no responsible government with- 
 out control of the agents of law and order. 
 
 By crediting Ireland with her whole " collected " revenue, 
 we can give her at once a balance of half a million. By freeing 
 her from the payment of Old Age Pensions, we can make the 
 balance three millions. With the elimination of the Land 
 Commission and the Police, we can make it five millions. 
 Then we can postulate an imaginary taxable capacity, an 
 ideal contribution to Imperial services, and a hypothetical 
 share of the National Debt, and so arrive at a Budget which 
 will look well on paper, but which will deceive nobody, and 
 be open to crushing criticism. 
 
 2. " Contract " Finance. It will be seen that both Mr. 
 Gladstone's schemes set up in Ireland though under the 
 Bill of 1893 only after six years a dual system of taxation, 
 Imperial and Irish, after the Federal model. The revenue, 
 " collected " or " true," derived from Imperial taxes levied in 
 Ireland, was to be paid, after the deduction of sums due to 
 the Imperial Government on various accounts, into the Irish 
 Exchequer. And into the same Exchequer went the proceeds 
 of taxes levied by Ireland herself. The distinguishing feature 
 of " Contract " finance is that it maintains the fiscal unity of 
 the British Isles. All taxation in Ireland would be per- 
 manently levied and collected, as before, by the Imperial 
 Parliament, Ireland being allowed only the barren and illusory 
 privilege of levying new additional taxes of her own. Out of 
 the Imperial Exchequer a lump sum of fixed amount, or a sum 
 equivalent to the revenue collected in Ireland, would be handed 
 over to Ireland, by contract, as it were, for the maintenance 
 of the Administration. 
 The simplicity of this scheme seems to me to be its only
 
 304 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 merit. It disposes of all complicated bookkeeping, all heart- 
 burnings over " true " and " collected " revenue, and all con- 
 troversies, for a long time at any rate, over an Irish contribu- 
 tion to the Empire ; while it involves and immensely facilitates 
 a subsidy based on the reservation of selected Irish services 
 for Imperial management and payment. On the other hand, 
 it is not Home Rule. It annihilates the responsibility of 
 Ireland for her own fortunes, and is, indeed, altogether incom- 
 patible with what we know as responsible government. Its 
 germ appeared in the Irish Council Bill of 1907 a Bill which 
 did not pretend to set up anything approaching responsible 
 government, and to which the scheme was therefore in a sense 
 appropriate, though it must, I think, have produced mis- 
 chievous results if it had been carried into law.* 
 
 I wish to speak with the utmost respect of Lord MacDonnell 
 and the other patriotic Irishmen who have advocated this 
 kind of financial solution. There was a time when it might 
 have been good policy for Ireland to obtain any even the 
 smallest financial powers of her own as a lever, though a very 
 bad lever, for the attainment of more. But we ought now to 
 make a sound and final settlement, and I do earnestly urge 
 upon all those who have Irish interests at heart to reject 
 schemes which merely evade, if they do not actually aggra- 
 vate, some of the pressing difficulties of the Irish problem 
 of to-day. The fact that Contract finance works well in India 
 is prima facie a reason why it should not work well in Ireland. 
 It does not exist, and it could not be made to show good 
 results, in any community of white men. If anyone is dis- 
 posed to trace a fault analogy which in any case would be a 
 false analogy with the lesser of the two small subsidies given 
 by the Dominion of Canada in aid of the Provincial adminis- 
 trations,! let him imagine what the moral and practical con- 
 sequences would be if, instead of constituting a small fraction 
 of the provincial income, this subsidy were increased to a lump 
 sum calculated by the Dominion Government as correct and 
 sufficient for the whole internal government of the Province. 
 And the pernicious results in a Canadian Province would be 
 
 * By Clause 5 the following sums were allocated to the Irish Council for 
 five years : (1) 3,750,000 for the maintenance of eight Government De- 
 partments ; (2) 300,000 for public works ; (3) 114,000 supplemental. 
 
 f See p. 299. Under the Act of 1867, No. 2 was earmarked for this purpose.
 
 FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 305 
 
 trivial beside the pernicious results in Ireland, where the whole 
 system of expenditure and revenue needs to be recast ; where 
 large economies are needed, together with additional outlay on 
 education ; and where above all, the sense of national responsi- 
 bility, deliberately stifled for centuries, needs to be evoked. 
 Nothing could be more cruel to Ireland than to give her a 
 fictitious financial freedom, and then to complain that she 
 did not use it well. No nation could use freedom well under 
 the Contract system of finance, whether based on a fixed grant 
 or on revenue derived from Ireland. It is not in human 
 nature to reduce expenditure unless the reduction is reflected 
 in reduced taxation. Every official threatened with retrench- 
 ment, even in the services under Irish control and, a fortiori, 
 in the services outside Irish control, would have a grievance 
 in which the public would sympathize, while resentment at an 
 unequal fiscal union would be unabated. Irish statesmen, 
 like any other men in the same position, would be exposed 
 unfairly to the continual temptation of preserving institu- 
 tions and payments as they were, of making changes only of 
 personnel, and of annually appealing to Great Britain for more 
 money for new expenditure. These appeals could not possibly 
 be refused. If Great Britain chooses to place Ireland in a 
 position of financial dependence, she must take the conse- 
 quences and pay the bill, as in the past, even if the bill exceeds 
 the revenue derived from Ireland. But, indeed, under Con- 
 tract finance, attempts to make Irish expenditure conform to 
 Irish revenue would necessarily be abandoned. 
 
 Bad as the results must be, we are inexorably driven to 
 some form of Contract finance directly we relinquish its anti- 
 type, financial independence. There is very little practical 
 difference between the Gladstonian and later plans. We may 
 be drawn along the downward path either by considerations 
 of revenue, or considerations of expenditure, or by both com- 
 bined. To retain Imperial control of Customs and Excise, 
 while crediting the Irish proceeds to Ireland, is in itself 
 equivalent to making three-quarters of Irish tax revenue take 
 the form of an annual money grant fixed by Great Britain. 
 If Englishmen also want to retain control over Irish Police, 
 and Irishmen are short-sighted enough to desire Imperial 
 control, as a corollary of Imperial payment, of Old Age Pen- 
 
 20
 
 306 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 sions, National Insurance, or Land Purchase, there at once 
 are four millions, or more than a third of present Irish ex- 
 penditure, withheld from Irish authority. To cover the re- 
 maining seven millions by a Contract allowance, instead of 
 going through the pretence of allotting items of revenue and 
 of deducting a contribution to Imperial services, is a step 
 which is only too likely to commend itself to harassed states- 
 men. But it would not be Home Rule. 
 
 This is not a matter of speculation, but of experience. As 
 long ago as 1818, in the case of Canada, we discarded as vicious 
 the old doctrine that a dependency ought not to be allowed 
 to provide for the whole cost of government out of its own 
 taxes, for fear that its Legislature would control policy. If 
 we are going to remove features which make Ireland resemble 
 a Crown Colony now, do not let us import others which recall 
 the ancient fallacies of a century ago. 
 
 There remains to be considered the important question of 
 loans, and to that I shall devote a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE* 
 
 I. LAND PURCHASE LOANS. 
 
 THE data of the land problem are as follows : 
 
 The superficial area of Ireland is 20,350,725 acres, and in 
 1909 it was utilized as follows : 
 
 
 Acres. 
 
 Per- 
 centage. 
 
 Area under tillage, hay and fruit 
 
 4,582,697 
 9,997,445 
 
 22-5 
 ) /,-, 
 
 Grazed mountain land . . ... ... ... 
 
 2 543 569 
 
 61-6 
 
 Woods, etc. 
 
 301 444 
 
 1-5 
 
 Bog, barren mountain, water, roads, townlands, etc. 
 
 2,925,570 
 
 14-4 
 
 Total 
 
 20 350,725 
 
 lOO'O 
 
 
 
 
 The agricultural area, calculated by the exclusion of the last 
 item in the above column, works out at 17,425,155 acres, but 
 since bog forms part of a large number of farms, we may, 
 for the purposes of Land Purchase, place the agricultural area 
 of Ireland at 18,739,644 acres, the figure given in the Census 
 of 1901, and its annual value for rating purposes, as given 
 in the same census, at 10,061,667. 
 
 This area is divided into 603,827 agricultural holdings, 
 which are in the hands of 554,060 occupiers, and vary in size 
 from vast pasture ranches to the tiny plots of miserable rock- 
 sown soil, which abound in the congested districts of the west. 
 
 But small holdings largely predominate. More than two- 
 thirds do not exceed 30 acres ; 153,565 are between 5 and 
 15 acres, and 147,580 are below 5 acres. 
 
 * Parts of this chapter have appeared in a paper by the Author in " Home 
 Rule Problems." 
 
 f Agricultural Statistics of Ireland, 1909. 
 
 307
 
 308 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Size, however, is by itself an imperfect index to value. 
 The effects of the ancient confiscations and of the extra- 
 ordinarily unequal distribution of land which they and the 
 bad Irish agrarian system produced may be gauged by the 
 valuation figures of the Census of 1901, which showed that 
 335,491, or 68-5 per cent, of the total number of holdings 
 had an annual value (for rating purposes) not exceeding 15, 
 while they covered only a little more than a third of the total 
 agricultural area ; 134,182 of these holdings were rated below 
 4, and covered only 1,360,000 acres. 
 
 All farms rated below 4, and a large number of those below 
 15, may be regarded as " uneconomic " that is, incapable 
 by themselves of supplying a decent living to the farmer and 
 his family. 
 
 I shall say no more here about the legislation beginning 
 forty years ago, which revolutionized the agrarian tenure 
 derived directly from the Penal Code, and converted the Irish 
 tenant into a " judicial " tenant with a rent fixed by the Land 
 Commission, with security of tenure, and free sale of the 
 tenant-right.* There are now in Ireland two distinct classes 
 of occupying tenants, " judicial " tenants, and purchasing 
 tenants, and it is upon the question of the State-aided trans- 
 ference of the land from the landlord to the tenant that I wish 
 to concentrate the reader's attention. 
 
 The principle of Land Purchase is this : The State advances 
 money, raised by a public loan, to the tenant, who pays off 
 the landlord with it, and becomes for a fixed period the tenant 
 of the State. During this period he pays, in lieu of rent, an 
 annuity, which represents both interest and sinking-fund 
 on the capital sum advanced to him. At the end of the period, 
 which, of course, will vary with the fixed annual amount of 
 the sinking-fund, he becomes owner in fee-simple of his 
 farm. 
 
 There is no charity to the tenant. He borrows the money 
 and pays it back in a perfectly regular way, and the State has 
 made a temporary investment of a profitable character. 
 
 And now, for the last time, I must trouble the reader with 
 a little indispensable history. There are four phases hi the 
 history of Irish Land Purchase. 
 
 1. John Bright was the first British statesman to maintain 
 * See pp. 10-17, 66-71.
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 309 
 
 that no healthy and lasting readjustment of the relations 
 between landlord and tenant in Ireland could ever be made 
 by law. He advocated State-aided purchase ; and in the 
 Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and the Land Acts of 
 1870 and 1881, clauses were inserted allowing the State to 
 advance money for Land Purchase. The conditions, however, 
 were so onerous, both to landlord and tenant, that only 7,665 
 tenants out of more than half a million were able to avail 
 themselves of these purchase clauses. 
 
 2. The Ashbourne Act of 1885 was the first successful 
 measure of the kind. Five millions were advanced under it, 
 and five millions more under an extending Act of 1887. Next 
 came the Act of 1891, empowering the loan of thirty-three 
 millions, followed by the amending and simplifying Act of 
 1896. These Acts form a body of legislation by themselves, 
 of which I need refer only to a few salient characteristics. 
 They were all alike in settling the tenant's annuity (in lieu 
 of rent) at 4 per cent, on the purchase money, though the 
 proportions allocated to interest and sinking-fund varied. 
 Under the first two Acts the period for final redemption of his 
 loan by the tenant was forty-nine years, under the third 
 forty-two years, though this period was extended to seventy 
 years if the tenant availed himself of decadal reductions in 
 the annuity, proportionate to the capital paid off by the 
 sinking-fund. 
 
 The average price of the holdings sold under these Acts 
 represented seventeen and a half years' purchase, and the 
 tenant's great inducement to buy was that, by the aid of 
 cheap State credit, the annuity he paid, even over so short a 
 period as forty-nine years, represented a reduction of more 
 than 20 per cent, on his existing judicial rent. 
 
 Under the first Act, that of 1885, the landlord received the 
 purchase money in cash, under the other two, in guaranteed 
 3 per cent, or 2| per cent, stock, an arrangement which suited 
 him very well as long as Government stocks maintained the 
 high level which they reached in the period preceding the 
 South African War. With the heavy fall in stocks during 
 and after the war, purchase came to a standstill. The net 
 result of the operations under the Acts of 1885 to 1896 was 
 that close upon twenty-four million pounds were advanced to 
 72,000 tenants, occupying about two and a half million acres,
 
 310 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 out of the total of 18,739,644 acres which constitute the 
 agricultural area of Ireland. 
 
 3. Once begun, purchase had to be continued, if for no other 
 reason than that a purchasing tenant paid in annuity a 
 substantially lower sum than the non-purchasing judicial 
 tenant paid in rent, with the additional, if distant, prospect 
 of an absolute fee-simple in the future 
 
 Mr. Wyndham, acting on the recommendation of a friendly 
 Conference between landlords and tenants, took the bull by 
 the horns in 1903, and carried the great Land Act of that year. 
 Under the Wyndham Act the system of cash payment to the 
 landlord, dropped since 1891, was resumed, on a basis calcu- 
 lated to give a selling landlord a sum which, invested in gilt- 
 edged 3 or 3J per cent, stocks, would yield him as much as 
 the second term judicial rents on the holdings sold, less 10 per 
 cent., representing his former cost of collection ; while the 
 annuity payable by the tenant in lieu of rent was reduced from 
 4 to 3J per cent., of which 2 per cent, was interest on the 
 purchase money advanced, and % per cent, was sinking-fund. 
 This reduction involved an extension of the period of redemp- 
 tion from forty-nine to sixty-eight and a half years. The 
 annuity was calculated to represent an average reduction of 
 from 15 to 25 per cent, on second-term judicial rents. Since 
 the gross income of the landlord was to be reduced only by 
 10 per cent, on a basis of 3 per cent, investments, while the 
 annual payment by the tenant was to be reduced by an average 
 of 20 per cent., clearly there was a gap to be filled up, and 
 this gap was filled by a State bonus to the selling landlord of 
 12 per cent, on the purchase money, a bonus which went 
 wholly to him personally, clear of all reversionary rights under 
 settlements. A sum of twelve millions altogether was to be 
 expended on the bonus. 
 
 In addition to direct sales between landlord and tenant 
 through the Estates Commissioners, large powers were also 
 given both to the Land Commission and the Congested Districts 
 Board for fche purchase and resale of certain classes of estates 
 land in congested districts, untenanted land, etc. 
 
 The Act was enormously popular. The landlord, in view 
 of the manifold insecurities of land tenure in Ireland, made 
 an excellent bargain, and the tenant, tempted by the imme-
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 311 
 
 diate transformation of his rent into an annuity of reduced 
 amount, ignored the extension by twenty years of the period 
 of redemption, and was willing to agree at high prices for the 
 purchase of his land. The average price of land sold rose from 
 the seventeen and a half years' purchase under the old Acts 
 to over twenty years' purchase, and the soil of Ireland rapidly 
 began to change hands. But the Act broke down on finance, 
 as adapted to what were then estimated as the requirements 
 of the purchase operation. The estimate for the total sum 
 required was one hundred millions, and the purchase money 
 was to be raised by successive issues of 2| per cent. Guaran- 
 teed Land Stock. Sums needed from time to time for payment 
 of the landlord's bonus were also raised by stock, and were 
 placed to an account known as the Land Purchase Aid Fund. 
 
 Now, any loss on flotation, due to stock being issued at a 
 discount, was to be borne, in the first instance, by the Ireland 
 Development Grant,* and, if and when that was exhausted, 
 by the ratepayers of Ireland through deduction from the 
 grants in aid of Local Taxation. f The stock, like all Govern- 
 ment stocks at that period, fell heavily from the first, and in 
 1908 the point was reached when further issues would have 
 entailed a heavy loss payable out of Irish rates, growing 
 ultimately, as it was calculated, to an annual charge of more 
 than half a million. The infliction of such a burden upon the 
 ratepayers of Ireland was felt to be inequitable. Ireland 
 was not responsible for the evils which necessitated purchase, 
 and even if she were, the ratepayers were not the right persons 
 to be mulcted. Meanwhile, purchase was at a complete 
 standstill. 
 
 4. This serious situation led to Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 
 1909, which was based upon the Report of a Treasury Com- 
 mittee which sat in the previous year.J The problem was 
 twofold : (a) how to deal with future agreements to purchase, 
 between landlord and tenant ; (6) how to deal with agreements 
 to purchase pending under the Act of 1903, but as yet uncom- 
 pleted. 
 
 (a) With regard to future agreements, there are four main 
 points : (1) The old policy of payment in stock, instead of in 
 cash, is reverted to, and the stock is a 3 per cent, stock. 
 * See p. 270-271. f See p. 267. J Cd. 4005, 1908.
 
 312 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 (2) The tenant's annuity is raised from 3J to 3 per cent. 
 
 (3) The period of redemption is reduced from sixty-eight and 
 a half years to sixty-five and a half years. (4) The landlord's 
 bonus is allocated on a graduated scale, under which the 
 higher the price the land is sold at, the less is the bonus con- 
 ferred. These changes, though no doubt somewhat prejudicial 
 to the prospects of Land Purchase, were absolutely necessary, 
 owing to a cause beyond human control the condition of the 
 money-market . 
 
 (6) In regard to pending purchase agreements arrived at 
 under the old Act, no alteration is made in the terms of the 
 bargains already concluded between landlord and tenant ; 
 but changes are made in the method of financing these agreed 
 sales. Briefly, parties can obtain priority in treatment among 
 the enormous mass of cases awaiting the decision of the Land 
 Commission by agreeing to accept 2f per cent, stock at a price 
 not lower than 92 per cent, (which means, at present prices, that 
 the loss on flotation is split between the landlord and the State), 
 or, by waiting their turn, they can obtain half the price in stock 
 at 92, and half in cash. Payments elected to be made wholly 
 in cash come last of all. Bonus to be paid in cash as before. 
 
 Losses caused by the flotation of stock at a discount no 
 longer fall upon the Irish rates. Any loss not capable of 
 being borne by the Ireland Development Grant is to be borne 
 by the Imperial Exchequer. 
 
 Other important clauses gave compulsory powers of purchase 
 to the Congested Districts Board, and, in the case of "con- 
 gested estates " and untenanted land outside the jurisdiction 
 of the Board, to the Estates Commissioners. Otherwise 
 Purchase and Sale remained voluntary. 
 
 So much for the history of Land Purchase. How exactly 
 do we stand at the present moment ? 
 
 In round numbers, nearly 24 millions have actually been 
 advanced under the old Acts prior to 1 903, and up to March of 
 this year (1911) a further sum of 42 L millions had actually 
 been advanced under the Wyndham Act of 1903 and the 
 Birrell Act of 1909.* 
 
 * This and subsequent figures are taken from an answer to question in the 
 House of Commons, July 25, 1911, and from the current Reports of the Land 
 Commission and Estates Commissioners.
 
 LAND PUKCHASE FINANCE 313 
 
 That makes a total of 66 millions actually advanced to 
 165,133 tenants up to March of 1911, covering the purchase of 
 nearly 6 million acres of land, or nearly a third of the total agri- 
 cultural area of Ireland. The tenants of the land are now 
 quasi-freeholders, and will eventually be complete freeholders. 
 In addition, agreements for the purchase of properties by 
 150,490 tenants, under the Wyndham and Birrell Acts, at a 
 total price of 46 millions, for 4 million acres, were pending 
 in March, 1911, though the sale and vesting were not yet 
 completed. The properties represented by these agreements 
 will be duly transferred in the course of the next few years, 
 though the congestion of business is very great. 
 
 That will make a total of 113 millions advanced to 315,623 
 tenants for the purchase of 11 million acres under ah" Acts up 
 to and including that of 1909. Now, how much more will be 
 required ? We have only one recent official estimate that 
 made by the Land Commission in 1908 for the Treasury 
 Committee which sat to consider the crisis in Land Pur- 
 chase. It did not pretend to give an accurate forecast, but 
 only to estimate the maximum amount which would be needed, 
 on the assumption that all unsold land would eventually be 
 sold at the average price reached under the Act of 1903.* It 
 is certain that the amount so calculated, covering as it does all 
 classes and descriptions of agricultural land, and including 
 land farmed by the landlord himself, as well as short-term 
 pasture tenancies,! will considerably exceed the actual require- 
 ments. Some of the unsold land, especially of the pasture 
 land, will never need to be sold ; nor is the average purchase 
 price likely to remain permanently as high as that obtained 
 under the Act of 1903. 
 
 Still, this speculative estimate gives us an outside figure 
 which is useful. The conclusion from it is that 95 millions 
 
 * Cd. 4412, 1908. The basis taken was the Poor Law valuation of the 
 lands unsold, multiplied by the number of years purchase of the lands sold 
 under the Act of 1903. On this basis the value of the land neither sold nor 
 agreed to be sold in 1908 was .103,931,848. On the basis of acreage, the 
 estimate worked out at 102,078,443, and on the basis of holdings (regarded 
 as unreliable by the Commissioners) at 92,660,694. The total sum required 
 from first to last, including sums already advanced under all the various Acts, 
 was 208,366,175. 
 
 t Pasture land let on eleven months' tenancies (a common form of tenure) 
 counts as untenanted land, and is subject to purchase by the Land Commis- 
 sioners, compulsorily, if necessary.
 
 314 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 may be required to finance all future sales initiated under the 
 Act of 1909. 
 
 But if we want to know how much cash may be wanted, 
 dating from March, 1911, onwards, to finance Land Purchase, 
 we must add the 46 \ millions needed for sales now agreed upon, 
 and waiting to be carried through, but not yet completed. 
 That brings the total to 141 \ millions. 
 
 For the reasons given above, I think we might very well 
 strike off 20 from the 95 millions of future sales, and so reduce 
 the total to 121 millions. 
 
 Two further questions remain to be considered : (1) Can 
 we assume that in the future purchase will proceed smoothly ? 
 (2) Who pays for the machinery of Land Purchase, and what 
 is the security for the money advanced ? 
 
 1 . The Act of 1 909 is still young. At the end of March, 1911, 
 applications had been lodged for the direct sale of 5,477 hold- 
 ings at a price of 1,623,526, representing an average of 20-8 
 years' purchase, and negotiations were in progress for the pur- 
 chase by the Congested Districts Board of estates worth 
 another \\ millions. Total, a little over 3 millions a sub- 
 stantial amount of business in view of the artificial acceleration 
 caused by events in 1907 and 1908, the subsequent reaction, 
 and the enormous arrears of business still remaining to be 
 cleared up. 
 
 We should naturally expect a slight check to purchase under 
 the Act of 1909, since the inducement both to landlord and 
 tenant is less. The tenant would be inclined to hold out for 
 a lower price because his annuity is higher (though signs of 
 this check are not yet apparent), and the landlord is paid in 
 a stock whose market price seems to be slowly but steadily 
 falling. It is now (November, 1911) at 86 \. On the other hand, 
 the wise change in the allocation of the bonus places a much- 
 needed premium on sales of poor land at low prices, and 
 reverses the process by which a wealthy landlord of good land 
 sometimes obtained the largest reward for submission to sale.* 
 Moreover, there is constant pressure towards purchase owing 
 to the better financial position of the purchasing tenant over 
 the non-purchasing or judicial tenant, while the fear in the 
 
 * But not always. Heavily mortgaged landlords profited most, perhaps, 
 under the Act of 1903.
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 315 
 
 landlord's mind of further periodical reductions in the judicial 
 rents tends to induce him to meet this pressure halfway. 
 
 Still, there is a point beyond which such pressure might 
 not be strong enough to carry on voluntary Purchase, especially 
 if the 3 per cent, stock continued to fall. Wide powers of 
 compulsion,* covering considerably more than a third of Ire- 
 land, and including the poorest areas, where purchase is most 
 needed, already exist under the Act of 1909. Some think 
 that general compulsion will be needed. Other well-informed 
 men count with confidence on completing all the necessary part 
 of the purchase of Irish land in from twelve to fifteen years 
 under the existing system. On the other hand, it is necessary 
 to contemplate the possible need for universal compulsion. 
 
 2. Cost of the working of Land Purchase, and security for 
 the money advanced. It is just as well to make these points 
 perfectly clear, in view of the legends which obtain circulation 
 about the " giving " of British money for the purchase of Irish 
 land. 
 
 The cost of the Land Purchase machinery falls at present 
 on the taxpayers of the whole United Kingdom, including, of 
 course, those of Ireland. It amounted in 1909-10, as I showed 
 in the last chapter, to 414,500, and for 1911 the estimate is 
 544,395. This sum includes the administrative cost of the 
 Land Commission and Estates Commissioners, the temporary 
 losses on flotation caused in financing, under the Act of 1909, 
 the balance of agreements made under the Act of 1903, and 
 the bonus to landlords. 
 
 The Treasury, in their returns estimating the revenue and 
 expenditure of various parts of the United Kingdom, debit 
 the whole of this sum against Ireland, and, moral responsibility 
 apart, I regard it as necessary that, under Home Rule, Ireland 
 should assume both the cost and the management of Purchase. 
 
 Apart from the annual vote I have mentioned, Land Pur- 
 chase pays for itself. The security for the individual holders 
 of the Guaranteed Land Stock by means of which the purchase 
 money is raised is the Consolidated Fund of the United King- 
 dom, but the Consolidated Fund has never been called upon 
 for a penny, either for interest or capital, and never will be. 
 
 * Only once exercised up to October, 1911 : over Lord Inchiquin's estate 
 in Clare, to be acquired for the relief of congestion.
 
 316 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 At present the initial security of the Government which 
 controls the Consolidated Fund in other words, the initial 
 security of the United Kingdom taxpayers is the Irish rates ; 
 for the grants in aid of Irish local taxation still form a guarantee 
 fund chargeable with the unpaid annuities of defaulting 
 tenants, though they have escaped the liability for losses on 
 the flotation of stock at a discount. The ultimate security is 
 the purchased land itself ; for, in the last resort, a defaulting 
 tenant who, it must be remembered, is a State tenant, can be 
 sold up. But the really important security is the tenant him- 
 self. The Irish tenants, treated properly, pay their debts as 
 honestly and punctually as any other class of men in the world. 
 Annuities in arrear are negligible. The last Report of the 
 Land Commission shows that out of two million pounds of 
 annuities due from 165,133 purchasing tenants, and close upon 
 another two millions of interest (in lieu of rent) upon holdings 
 agreed to be purchased by 150,490 tenants a total of nearly 
 four million pounds only 28,084 were uncollected on 
 March 31 last. The cases of hopeless default, leading to a 
 sale of the land, were only fifty-four. Not a penny has 
 actually been lost. 
 
 The State, then, or, if we choose so to put it, the United 
 Kingdom taxpayers, are safe from loss, and make a good in- 
 vestment. There has never been the faintest symptom of a 
 strike against annuities, and the only cause which could con- 
 ceivably ever suggest such a strike would be the irritation 
 provoked by a persistent refusal to grant Home Rule. Even 
 that possibility I regard as out of the question, because there 
 is a sanctity attaching to annuities which it would be hard to 
 impair. Still, to speak broadly, it is true that Home Rule will 
 improve a security already good, and that Home Rule, with 
 financial independence, will make it absolutely impregnable. 
 
 Let me sum up. 
 
 More than half the agricultural land of Ireland is sold to the 
 tenants, or agreed to be sold. Eleven million acres out of 
 18| million acres have changed hands, or will soon change 
 hands ; 315,623 out of 554,060 occupiers now pay annuities 
 or interest in lieu of rent, to the amount of nearly 4 million 
 pounds. In regard to value, out of a total value of 208 millions 
 for the whole agricultural land of Ireland, 66t millions have
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 317 
 
 actually been advanced for purchase, 46 millions are due to 
 be advanced under signed agreements ; and, on the extreme 
 estimate of the Land Commission, based on the supposition 
 that all the remaining land will ultimately be sold, 95 millions 
 more will have to be advanced. Total future liability on the 
 extreme estimate, 141 millions ; or, if we take the more 
 moderate and reasonable figure I suggested, 121 millions. 
 Now, two conditions must be laid down 
 
 1. Purchase ought to continue. 
 
 2. Cheap Imperial credit is necessary for it. 
 
 These conditions ought not to entail, beyond a strictly limited 
 point, the continued control of Purchase by the Imperial 
 Government. That step, as I suggested at p. 221, might 
 involve Imperial control over (1) the Congested Districts 
 Board ; (2) the whole work of the Land Commission, outside 
 Purchase, and all Irish land legislation ; (3) the Irish police ; 
 because the power of distraint for annuities, the last resource of 
 the creditor Government, rests, of course, with the arm of 
 the law. 
 
 Any one of these consequences, as I have urged, would 
 be inconsistent with responsible government in Ireland. 
 
 What are the objections to Irish control over Purchase, with 
 its corollary, Irish payment of the running costs of Purchase ? 
 Two distinct interests have to be considered : (1) That of the 
 British taxpayer ; (2) that of the landlord. 
 
 1. If we carry out the plan I have advocated, the British 
 taxpayer, as soon as he ceases to contribute to the diminishing 
 subsidy suggested at p. 284 in order to meet the initial deficit 
 in the national Irish balance-sheet, will cease to contribute 
 anything towards the running costs, landlord's bonus, and 
 flotation losses of a Purchase operation for the necessity of 
 which Great Britain, in the past, was in reality responsible. 
 Great Britain is under a moral obligation to continue to 
 support Land Purchase with her national credit, which is in- 
 dispensable. She is also entitled to demand whatever reason- 
 able conditions she thinks fit, for example, a share in the 
 nomination of Land and Estates Commissioners ; while any 
 new legislation will, in the ordinary course, need her assent. 
 The security, as I said above, will be impregnable. The pur-
 
 318 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 chasing tenant would become the tenant of the Irish State. 
 The Irish Government, as a whole, instead of the individual 
 annuitants, would, of course, be responsible to the Imperial 
 Government, would collect the annuities itself, and bear any 
 contingent loss by their non-payment. To repudiate a public 
 obligation of that sort would be as ruinous to Ireland as the 
 repudiation of a public debt is to any State in the world. 
 
 In point of fact, the Irish Government would find it good 
 policy to popularize Irish Land Stock in Ireland. At present 
 prices the 3 per cent, stock is among the cheapest and safest 
 in the world, and would return to the farmer thrice as much 
 interest as the average bank deposit which he now favours. 
 
 Mercifully, there is no exact historical precedent for such a 
 case as Ireland, though, on a small scale, Prince Edward 
 Island is an instructive parallel.* But if precedents, in the 
 shape of guaranteed loans to self-governing Colonies, are 
 needed, they exist. The most relevant and recent is the 
 Imperial guaranteed loan of 35 millions made to the Transvaal 
 by Mr. Balfour's Government in 1903 after the great war. 
 Why it should be a heresy to do for Ireland what we did for 
 the Transvaal, I am at a loss to conceive. The loan became, 
 of course, an obligation of the Colony when it received Home 
 Rule, and in 1907 a further guaranteed loan of 5 millions was 
 authorized, of which 4 millions has been issued. Like Irish 
 Land Stock, these loans are secured on the Consolidated Fund ; 
 but I do not think a fear is now suggested that the Consoli- 
 dated Fund is in danger on that account. Prophecies of that 
 sort were common enough in the mouths of those who opposed 
 Transvaal Home Rule, but they did not long survive its enact- 
 ment. 
 
 Another precedent is a guaranteed railway loan to Canada 
 in 1873 of 3,600,000, which is just now becoming redeemable, 
 while the Crown Colony of Mauritius received a guaranteed 
 loan of 600,000 in 1892. The British and Irish taxpayers 
 have also made themselves responsible for 9,424,000 on ac- 
 
 * See p. 75. There the loan for compulsory Land Purchase was ultimately 
 raised by the Dominion of Canada, as one of the conditions upon which 
 Prince Edward Island entered the Federation in 1873. Under the Land 
 Purchase Act, passed in 1875 by the Island Legislature, with the assent of 
 the Dominion, three Commissioners adjudicated upon the sales ; representing 
 the Island Government, the Landlords, and the Dominion Government 
 respectively.
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 319 
 
 count of Egypt ; 6,023,700 on account of Greece ; and 
 5,000,000 on account of Turkey. The total nominal amount 
 of the guaranteed loans to countries, colonial or foreign, outside 
 the United Kingdom is 63, 647, 700. The total amount outstand- 
 ing on March 31, 1911, was 59,474,200, and the Government 
 holds securities only to the value of 4,800,556 against these 
 liabilities, leavingthe net liability of the taxpayer at 54,673,644. 
 
 The net liability of the taxpayer at the same date on account 
 of Irish Guaranteed Land Stocks of all descriptions was 
 65,764,054.* Ireland has a claim to Imperial credit far 
 superior to any of the Colonies, dependencies, or foreign Powers 
 mentioned, and the credit should not entail control, or the 
 representation of Ireland at Westminster. 
 
 Incidentally, it goes without saying that Ireland, in common 
 with the Colonies, should receive the very valuable privilege 
 of having independent loans raised by herself inscribed at the 
 Bank of England, and made trustee securities. 
 
 2. It may be argued that the Congested Districts Board 
 and the Land Commission, and through them Irish statesmen, 
 may be subjected to local pressure hostile to the landlord's 
 interests, and that the Irish Government would feel itself more 
 free for social and other reforms if the land question were 
 placed legally outside their purview. My answer is, in the 
 first place, that Great Britain would cease to lend if her con- 
 ditions were unfulfilled ; in the second place, that in this, as in 
 all matters, we are bound to place faith in the self-respect and 
 sense of justice of a free Ireland in its common prudence, too ; 
 for it would be a disaster whose magnitude is universally recog- 
 nized in Ireland if any course were to be taken which prevented 
 the landlord class from joining in the great work of making a 
 new Ireland. Fair treatment of the landlords by a free Ireland, 
 as distinguished from fair treatment at the hands of an external 
 authority, would do more than anything else to bring about 
 a reconciliation. That is human nature all the world over. 
 
 II. MINOR LOANS TO IRELAND. 
 
 It remains only to refer briefly to two other cases where 
 Ireland benefits from Imperial credit. 
 
 (1) The Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906 sanctioned the 
 * Finance accounts of the United Kingdom, 1911.
 
 320 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 advance of money through the Land Commission to Rural 
 Councils for building labourers' cottages a class of loans 
 previously made by the Public Works Commissioners of 
 Ireland. 3,111,816 had been advanced under this head on 
 March 31, 1911, and 1,138,184 had been applied for. The 
 money is raised by guaranteed 2f per cent, stock in the same 
 way as the money for Land Purchase. 
 
 (2) In addition, there are the loans granted by the Irish Com- 
 missioners of Public Works. In their capacity as lenders, which 
 is only one of a multitude of capacities, the Commissioners are 
 really a subordinate branch of the Treasury, and fulfil the same 
 function as the Public Works Loans Commissioners in Great 
 Britain. They lend principally to local authorities for all 
 manner of public works and public health requirements, also 
 to private individuals, mainly for the improvement of land, 
 and, to a small extent, to Arterial Drainage Boards and to 
 railways. They get their money from the National Debt 
 Commissioners, and in 1909-10 issued loans to the amount of 
 293,233 a figure which shows a considerable reduction on 
 that of the previous two years.* The total amount of 35,000 
 outstanding loans on March 31, 1910, was 9,608,110, of which 
 between two-thirds and three-quarters were due from local 
 authorities. The interest varies, as in Great Britain, from 2| 
 to 5 per cent., according to the nature of the security, and in 
 1909-10 averaged 3 10s. 6d. Most of the loans are secured on 
 local rates, where the interest payable is either 3J or 3| per 
 cent., according to the period of the loan ; others on under- 
 takings such as harbours ; and others on the land for the im- 
 provement of which the money is borrowed. 
 
 Here, then, are two small and secondary problems. Under 
 Home Rule Ireland will have no claim to further Imperial 
 credit for loans of either of the above classes. On the 
 other hand, there is no reason why the Treasury, if it 
 pleases, and on its own terms, should not lend as before, 
 though not directly, as it virtually does now, but indirectly, 
 by loan to the Irish Government. The security will 
 be just as good, and probably better. If a negligent 
 
 * Report of the Commissioners of Public Works, 1910. The amount in 
 1907-08 was ,434,796 ; in 1908-09, 361,282. The Commissioners have been 
 lending since 1819, and have lent since that date <48, 792,319.
 
 LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 321 
 
 Local Government Board under Irish control sanctions reckless 
 loans by local authorities, and a negligent Irish Government 
 advances for such loans money borrowed from Great Britain, 
 the Irish Treasury will suffer. Such eventualities need not 
 seriously be considered. The analogy with the Transvaal and 
 Canada loans, which were mainly for public works, is very 
 close. 
 
 21
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION * 
 
 I HAVE dealt with the major issues of Home Rule. The 
 exclusion or retention of Irish Members at Westminster, 
 and the powers above all, the financial powers of the Irish 
 State, are the two points of cardinal importance. As I have 
 shown, they are inseparably connected, and form, in reality, 
 one great question. 
 
 I have endeavoured to prove that from whatever angle 
 we approach that central issue, whether we argue from repre- 
 sentation to powers, or from powers to representation, and 
 whether the particular powers we argue from be financial, 
 legislative, or executive ; whether we place Irish, British, or 
 Imperial interests in the forefront of our exposition we are 
 led irresistibly to the colonial solution that is, to the cessation 
 of Irish representation at Westminster, coupled with a conces- 
 sion to Ireland of the full legislative and executive authority 
 appropriate to that measure of independence, and, above all, 
 with fiscal autonomy. 
 
 All the other provisions of the Bill are secondary. They 
 may be divided into two categories, which necessarily overlap : 
 
 1. Provisions concerning Ireland only. 
 
 2. Provisions defining the Imperial authority over Ireland. 
 The structure of the Irish Legislature, the position of the 
 
 Irish Judiciary, the safeguards for minorities, the provision 
 made for existing servants of the State, the statutory arrange- 
 ments, if any, for the future reorganization of the Irish Police 
 these and other questions are of great intrinsic importance, and 
 need the most careful discussion ; but they are altogether 
 subordinate to those we have already considered. If it be 
 over-sanguine to hope, in Ireland's interest, that they will be 
 discussed in a calm and dispassionate way, we can at least 
 
 * For details of prior Home Rule Bills, see the Appendix. 
 322
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 323 
 
 demand that those provisions belonging to the second category, 
 which present no appreciable difficulty, will not excite bitter 
 and barren disputes like those of 1893. 
 
 It is not within the scope of this volume to discuss ex- 
 haustively the secondary provisions of the Bill, or to suggest 
 the exact statutory form which those provisions, major or 
 minor, should take. In this chapter I shall deal briefly 
 with matters which I have hitherto left aside, and incidentally 
 give more precision to the points upon which I have already 
 suggested a conclusion, in both cases indicating, so far as 
 possible, the most useful precedents and parallels from other 
 Constitutions. The result will be the rough sketch of a Home 
 Rule Bill. 
 
 PREAMBLE. 
 
 " Whereas it is expedient that without impairing or restricting 
 the supreme authority of Parliament, an Irish Legislature should 
 be created, etc." So ran the opening sentence of the Home 
 Rule Bill of 1893. The words I have italicized are harmless 
 but superfluous. They have never appeared in the Constitu- 
 tions granted to Colonies, even at periods when the Colonies 
 were most distrusted. Nothing can impair the supreme 
 authority of Parliament. 
 
 EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY. 
 
 In all parts of the Empire, power emanates from the Sovereign, 
 and is wielded locally in his name. 
 
 Section 9 of the British North America Act of 1867 runs 
 as follows : " The Executive Government and authority 
 of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue and be 
 vested hi the Queen." Similar words are used in the South 
 Africa Act of 1909, and in the Commonwealth of Australia 
 Constitution Act of 1900. Curiously enough, these were Acts 
 to legalize the Federation, or Union, of separate Colonies, 
 and were passed at a time when the principle embodied needed 
 no affirmation. In earlier Acts for granting Colonial Constitu- 
 tions, the principle was taken for granted, and implied in 
 numerous provisions, but not stated explicitly. The most 
 recent unitary Constitution, that of the Transvaal (Section 47),
 
 324 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 was oven more reticent, though the principle was none the less 
 clear. The point is unimportant, and the words used in the 
 Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 (Clauses 5 and 7 respec- 
 tively), modified to meet a change of Sovereign, will serve very 
 well : ' ' The Executive power in Ireland (or the Executive 
 Government of Ireland) shall continue vested in His 
 Majesty. ..." 
 
 Thereon follow the provisions for delegation of the Royal 
 authority, first to the Sovereign's personal Representative 
 in Ireland, and then through him to the members of the 
 Irish Executive. The simpler these provisions are, the 
 better. What we know as responsible government has 
 never been defined in any Act of Parliament. The phrase 
 " responsible government " has only once appeared in any 
 Constitution namely, in the preamble of the Transvaal 
 Constitution granted in 1906, and even then no attempt was 
 made at definition, though certain sections, like certain sections 
 in the Australian Constitutions of 1855 and in the later Federal 
 Acts, inferentially suggested features of responsible government. 
 
 The system is two-sided. Ministers are responsible on the 
 one hand to the King direct, as in Great Britain, or to the 
 King's Representative, as in the Colonies, and, on the other 
 hand, to the elected Legislature. Ireland will resemble a 
 Colony in being a dependent State under a Representative of 
 the King namely, the Lord-Lieutenant. This personage, 
 corresponding to the Colonial Governor, will also have to act 
 in a dual capacity. On the one hand he will be responsible 
 to the King, or, virtually, to the British Cabinet, and, on the 
 other hand, he will be bound by an unwritten law to nominate 
 for the Government of Ireland persons acceptable to the 
 elected Legislature, and in Irish matters to act by their advice 
 in all normal circumstances. 
 
 Let us dispose first of the relation of the Ministers and of 
 other public officials to the Legislature. There will be no 
 question, presumably, of giving statutory power to this relation. 
 It is an unwritten custom (1) that Ministers must be members 
 of one branch of the Legislature ; (2) that they must hold 
 the confidence of the elected branch ; (3) that, as a Cabinet, 
 they stand or fall together ; and, lastly, (4) that all non-political 
 officials are excluded from the Legislature. The first and the
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 325 
 
 last of these conventions have taken legal form in some isolated 
 cases ;* the other two appear in no statute that has yet been 
 framed, f 
 
 Neither have the functions in practice exercised by the 
 Ministry or Cabinet, nor the relations which in practice exist 
 between it and the King's Representative, ever had statutory 
 definition. Whatever form the Home Rule Bill takes, it cannot 
 give legal precision to these things. The King's Representative 
 always nominates an Executive Council that is, a Cabinet 
 to " advise " him in the Government, and whether, as in the 
 Bill of 1893, that Council is called an Executive Committee 
 of the Privy Council of Ireland by analogy with the Dominion 
 of Canada, where it is the "King's Privy Council for Canada," 
 or whether it is merely an Executive Council is immaterial. 
 That it is, nominally, the constitutional duty of the King's 
 Representative (like that of the King himself) to perform 
 executive acts on the advice of his Ministers is never stated 
 expresssly. He is always, and generally in the text of the 
 Constitution, vested with the power of summoning, proroguing, 
 and dissolving the Legislature, and of giving or withholding 
 the Royal Assent to Bills. He also, by unwritten law, wields 
 the prerogative of Pardon, and appoints all public servants ; 
 and in all these cases, except in the case of appointing non- 
 political officials, he occasionally has to act on his own personal 
 responsibility. 
 
 This personal responsibility cannot be distinguished in 
 practice from his responsibility to the Crown, which appoints 
 and can remove him. Cases have arisen where the Governor 
 of a self-governing Colony has written home for special 
 guidance on some specific point, and where the answer given 
 has been that he must act on his own responsibility, or follow 
 the advice of his Ministers. All Colonial Governors, however, 
 whether or not their powers are defined in the Constitution, 
 
 * The Victorian and South Australian Constitutions of 1855 state in clear 
 terms that the Ministry must be members of the Legislature, and all the 
 Australian Constitutions of the same date, except that of Tasmania, formally 
 exclude all other officials from the Legislature. The Transvaal Constitution 
 of 1906 made no reference to either point ; nor do the Federating Acts of 
 1867, 1900, and 1909 for Canada, Australia, and South Africa. 
 
 + A fifth custom, very common, of compelling new Ministers to seek re- 
 election is incorporated in most of the Australian Constitutions, but was 
 expressly ruled out in Section 47 of the Transvaal Constitution of 1906.
 
 326 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 are appointed by Commission from the Crown with powers 
 defined in Letters Patent and Instructions as to their exercise. 
 These Letters Patent and Instructions are not of much impor- 
 tance in the case of a self-governing Colony where responsible 
 advice so largely controls the action of the Governor. Some- 
 times the executive powers given by Instructions to the 
 Governor are indirectly alluded to in the Constitution, as in 
 the South Africa Act of 1909, where, by Clause 9, under the 
 head of " Executive Government," the Governor-General is 
 " to exercise such powers and functions of the King as His 
 Majesty may be pleased to assign to him." In the Australian 
 and Canadian Acts of 1900 and 1867 respectively, the words 
 do not appear. I name this point because in Clause 5 of the 
 Home Rule Bill of 1893, and Clause 7 of the Bill of 1886, a 
 similar course was taken in providing that the Lord-Lieutenant 
 should " exercise any prerogatives, or other executive power 
 of the Queen, the exercise of which may be delegated to him 
 by Her Majesty." The words are not strictly necessary. 
 The Lord-Lieutenant will, of course, have his Letters Patent 
 and Instructions, but the powers of the Crown are theoretically 
 absolute. If the Crown, acting under responsible British 
 advice, should wish to defy the Irish Legislature, it could do 
 so whatever the terms of the Bill. 
 
 Naturally, there will be certain Imperial and non-Irish 
 matters in which the Lord-Lieutenant will act primarily under 
 the orders of the British Cabinet, and the Departmental British 
 Minister primarily responsible for Irish-Imperial matters would 
 be the Home Secretary.* 
 
 The question may be raised, as in 1893 (July 3, Hansard), 
 whether a staff of Imperial officials ought not to be set up 
 to conduct any Imperial business which has to be done in 
 Ireland, on the analogy of the Federal staff in the United 
 States. I hope Mr. Gladstone's answer will still hold good 
 that no such staff is needed ; that the Irish officials will be 
 responsible, and ought, on the Home Rule principle, to be 
 trusted, as they are trusted in the Colonies. 
 
 The Royal Assent to Bills is always a matter for express 
 enactment in the Constitution, but here the " instructions " 
 of the Governor, and even his personal " discretion," have 
 * See Hansard, July 3, 1893, Speech of Mr. John Morley.
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 327 
 
 generally been alluded to in recent Constitutions, whether 
 conferred by Act or Letters Patent. The typical form of 
 words is that the Governor " shall declare his Assent according 
 to his discretion, but subject to His Majesty's instructions.* 
 The Home Rule Bill of 1893 left out reference to " discretion," 
 and, on the other hand, is, I think, the only document of the 
 kind in which the " advice of the Executive Council " has 
 ever been expressly alluded to, although the practice, of course, 
 is that the Assent, normally, is given or withheld on that advice. 
 The Transvaal Constitution of 1906 (Section 39) was unique in 
 prescribing that special instructions must be received by 
 the Governor in the case of each proposed law, before the Assent 
 is given. I hope that will not be made a precedent for Ireland. 
 Such precautions only irritate the law-makers, and serve no 
 useful purpose. 
 
 Colonial Governors, besides the power of Assent and Veto, 
 may " reserve " Bills for the Royal pleasure, which is to be 
 signified within two years. Moreover, Bills which have 
 received the Governor's Assent may be disallowed within one 
 or two years. f Neither of these provisions appeared in the 
 Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, and neither appear to be 
 strictly necessary, owing to the proximity of Ireland. What- 
 ever is done, we may hope that the practice now established 
 hi Canada, where the Federal Government never disallows a 
 provincial law on any other ground than that it is ultra vires, 
 and, a fortiori, the similar practice as between Great Britain 
 and the Dominions, may be imitated in the case of Ireland. 
 
 To sum up, the terse and simple words of the Bill of 1886 
 really enunciate all that is necessary : 
 
 Constitution " ^' W ^ ne Executive Government of Ireland shall continue 
 of the vested in (Her) Majesty, and shall be carried on by the Lord- 
 
 Executive Lieutenant on behalf of (Her) Majesty with the aid of such 
 officers and such council as to Her Majesty may from time to 
 time seem fit. 
 
 " (2) Subject to any instructions which may from time to time be given by 
 (Her) Majesty, the Lord-Lieutenant shall give or withhold the assent of (Her) 
 
 * The words " subject to this Constitution " or " subject to this Act" are 
 sometimes added, but have no special significance. The Australian Common- 
 wealth Constitution Act does not mention the Governor's " instructions," but 
 only his " discretion." 
 
 j- British North America Act, 1867, Sects. 55-57 ; Commonwealth of Australia 
 Constitution Act, 1900, Sects. 58-60.
 
 328 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Majesty to Bills passed by the Irish Legislative Body, and shall exercise the 
 prerogatives of (Her) Majesty in respect of the summoning, proroguing, and 
 dissolving of the Irish Legislative Body, and any prerogatives the exercise of 
 which may be delegated to him by (Her) Majesty." 
 
 LOBD -LIEUTENANT AND CIVIL LIST. 
 
 The restriction as to the religion of the Lord-Lieutenant will, 
 of course, be removed. There is no reason why his term of 
 office should be limited by law. His salary, payable by Ireland, 
 should perhaps be stated in the Act, as in the case of Canada 
 and South Africa, though not in that of Australia. Australia, 
 on the other hand, has a statutory Civil List, and a fixed Civil 
 List was an invariable feature of the old Constitutions given 
 to self-governing Colonies. Canada and South Africa are 
 under no such restrictions, and it would be very inexpedient 
 to impose them upon Ireland. 
 
 LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY. 
 
 The Irish Legislature will be given power, according to the 
 historic phrase, " to make laws for the peace, order, and good 
 government of Ireland," subject to restrictions afterwards 
 named. That the laws should be only " in respect of matters 
 exclusively relating to Ireland or some part thereof " goes 
 without saying, and need not be copied from the Bill of 1893 
 (Clause 2). Nor need the superfluous proviso in the same 
 clause be reproduced, asserting the " supreme power and 
 authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom." The 
 supreme power becomes none the more supreme for such 
 assertions. Clause 2 of the Bill of 1886 is simple and 
 decisive : 
 
 "2. With the exceptions of and subject to the restrictions in this Act 
 mentioned, it shall be lawful for (Her) Majesty (the Queen), by and with the 
 advice of the Irish Legislative Body, to make laws for the peace, order, and 
 good government of Ireland, and by any such law to alter and repeal any 
 law in Ireland." 
 
 With the restrictions on the powers of the Legislature 
 I dealt fully enough hi Chapter X.,* and I need only sum- 
 marize my conclusions : 
 
 * See especially pp. 213-229.
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 329 
 
 1. Reservations of Imperial Authority. The Irish Legislature 
 should not have power to make laws upon 
 
 The Crown or a Regency. 
 
 Making of War or Peace. 
 
 Prize and Booty of War. 
 
 Army or Navy. 
 
 Foreign Relations and Treaties (excepting Commercial 
 
 Treaties). 
 
 Conduct as Neutrals. 
 Titles and Dignities. 
 Extradition. 
 .Treason. 
 Coinage. 
 Naturalization and Alienage. 
 
 Reservation of the nine subjects included in the bracket 
 is implied, without enactment, in all colonial Constitutions, 
 but in the Irish Bill it is no doubt necessary that all reserved 
 powers should be formally specified. 
 
 All powers not specifically reserved will belong to the Irish 
 Legislature, subject to those restrictions, constitutional or 
 statutory, which in matters like Trade and Navigation, Copy- 
 right, Patents, etc., bind the whole Empire. 
 
 Section 32 of the Bill of 1893, borrowed from the Colonial 
 Laws Validity Act, will no doubt be applied. 
 
 2. Minority Safeguards. This point, too, I dealt with in 
 Chapter X.* Let the Nationalist Members come forward 
 and frankly accept any prohibitory clauses which the fears 
 of the minority may suggest, provided that they do not impair 
 the ordinary legislative power which every efficient Legislature 
 must enjoy. Almost every conceivable safeguard for the pro- 
 tection of religion, denominational education, and civil rights 
 was inserted in the Bill of 1893, including even some of the 
 " slavery " Amendments to the United States Constitution. 
 The list may require revision (a) in view of the recent estab- 
 lishment of the National University, and the disappearances 
 of all apprehension about the status of Trinity College, Dublin ; 
 (6) in regard to an extraordinarily wide Sub-clause (No. 9) 
 about interference with Corporations ; (c) in regard to the 
 
 * See pp. 223-225.
 
 330 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 words, " in accordance with settled principles and precedents," 
 which appeared in Sub-clause (No. 8) (Legislature to make 
 no law "Whereby any person may be deprived of life, liberty, 
 or property without due process of law* in accordance with 
 settled principles and precedents" etc.). A debate on this 
 question may be found in Hansard, May 30, 1893. The 
 words italicized were added in Committee on the motion of 
 Mr. Gerald Balfour, though the Attorney- General declared 
 that they gave no additional strength to the phrase " due 
 process of law," while they certainly appear calculated to 
 provoke litigation. Sir Henry James appeared to think that 
 they made the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act ultra 
 vires. If that is their effect, there is no reason why they should 
 be inserted. Even a Canadian Province, whose powers are 
 more limited than those of the subordinate States in any other 
 Federation, has " exclusive " powers within its own borders 
 over " property and civil rights, "f an( i can, beyond any doubt, 
 suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, if it pleases. 
 
 The same superfluous words appeared in Sub-clause (No. 9) 
 about Corporations. 
 
 THE IRISH LEGISLATURE. J 
 
 As I urged in Chapter X., this is a subject in which large 
 powers of constitutional revision much larger than those 
 contained in either of the Home Rule Bills should be given 
 to the Irish Legislature itself, corresponding to the powers 
 given by statute to the self-governing Colonies, and to the 
 powers always held by the constituent States of a Federation. 
 In the Bill itself it would be wisest to follow beaten tracks as 
 far as possible, and not to embark on experiments. Present 
 conditions are, unhappily, very unfavourable for the elabora- 
 tion of any scheme ideally fit for Ireland. 
 
 * Taken from Amendment XIV. to the United States Constitution, passed 
 July 28, 1866. 
 
 t British North America Act, 1867, Sect. 92 (13). But the Province may 
 not encroach on powers reserved to the Dominion e.g., in bankruptcy 
 (Gushing v. Depuy [before Jud. Comm. of Privy Council]). See the "Con- 
 stitution of Canada," J. E. C. Munro, pp. 247-258. There has been much 
 litigation over points where Dominion and Federal powers overlapped. (See 
 " Federations and Unions of the British Empire," H. E. Egerton, pp. 151-153). 
 
 J For the proposals of the Bills of 1886 and 1893, see Appendix.
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 331 
 
 A Bi-Cameral Legislature. Working on this principle, we 
 must affirm that Ireland's position, without representation 
 in the Imperial Parliament, would certainly make a Second 
 Chamber requisite. Three of the Provinces within the Federa- 
 tion of Canada (Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario) 
 prefer to do without Second Chambers so do most of the 
 Swiss Cantons but all the Federal Legislatures of the world 
 are bi-cameral, and all the unitary Constitutions of self-govern- 
 ing Colonies have been, or are, bi-cameral. 
 
 The Upper Chamber. One simple course would be to con- 
 stitute the Upper Chamber of a limited number of Irish Peers, 
 chosen by the whole of their number, as they are chosen at 
 present for representation in the House of Lords. Historical 
 and practical considerations render this course out of the 
 question, though some people would be fairly sanguine about 
 the success of such a body in commanding confidence, on the 
 indispensable condition that all representation at West- 
 minster were to cease. It has been membership, before the 
 Union of an ascendency Parliament, and after the Union of an 
 absentee Parliament, which has kept the bulk of the Irish 
 peerage in violent hostility to the bulk of the Irish people. 
 Those Peers who seek and obtain a career in an Irish popular 
 Legislature to both branches of which they will, of course, 
 be eligible will be able to do valuable service to their country. 
 The same applies to all landlords. Now that land reform is 
 converting Ireland itself into a nation of small landholders, 
 who, in most countries, are very Conservative in tendency, the 
 ancient cleavage is likely to disappear. Indeed, an ideal 
 Second Chamber ought perhaps to give special weight to urban 
 and industrial interests, while aiming, not at an obstructive, 
 but at a revising body of steady, moderate, highly-educated 
 business men. 
 
 We have to choose one of two alternatives : a nomin- 
 ated or an elective chamber. The choice is difficult, for 
 second chambers all over the world may be said to be on 
 their trial. On the other hand, nothing vital depends upon 
 the choice, for experience proves that countries can nourish 
 equaUy under every imaginable variety of second chamber, 
 provided that means exist for enabling popular wishes, in the 
 long-run, to prevail. The European and American examples
 
 332 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 are of little use to us, and the widely varied types within the 
 Empire admit of no sure inferences. Allowance must be made 
 for the effect of the Referendum wherever it exists (as in 
 Australia and Switzerland), as a force tending to weaken 
 both Chambers, but especially the Upper Chamber of a Legis- 
 lature. It does, indeed, seem to be generally admitted, even 
 by Canadians, that the nominated Senate of the Dominion 
 of Canada, which is added to on strict party principles by 
 successive Governments, is not a success, and it was so re- 
 garded by the Australian Colonies when they entered upon 
 Federation, and set up an elective Senate. The South African 
 statesmen, who had to reckon with racial divisions similar to 
 those in Ireland, compromised with a Senate partly nomin- 
 ated, partly elected, but made the whole arrangement revisable 
 in ten years.* 
 
 It would be desirable, perhaps, on similar groundsof immediate 
 policy, to let those who now represent the minority in Ireland 
 have a deciding voice in the matter. No arrangement made 
 otherwise than by a free Ireland herself can be regarded as 
 final, and I suggest only that a nominated Chamber would be 
 the best expedient at the outset, or in the alternative a partly 
 nominated, partly elected Chamber. 
 
 If and in so far as the Upper Chamber is elective, should 
 election be direct or indirect ? There is a somewhat attractive 
 Irish precedent for indirect election, namely, the present highly 
 successful Department of Agriculture, whose Council and 
 Boards the County Councils have a share in constituting,! 
 and I have seen and admired a most ingenious scheme of 
 Irish manufacture for constructing the whole Irish Legislature 
 and Ministry on this principle. But the objections appear 
 to be considerable. Local bodies in the future should not be 
 mixed up in national politics. That has been their bane in 
 the past. Besides, the principle of indirect election is under 
 a cloud everywhere, most of all in the United States. Australia 
 rejected it in 1900, and the South Africans, while giving it 
 partial recognition in the Senate, made the expedient provisional. 
 The Lower House. The Lower House might very well be 
 elected on the same franchise and from the same constituencies 
 as at present, subject to any small redistributional modifica- 
 
 * South Africa Act, 1909, Sects. 24 and 25. f See pp. 155-162.
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 333 
 
 tions necessitated by changes of population. This is certainly 
 a matter which Ireland should have full power to settle for 
 itself subsequently. 
 
 Lord Courtney's proposals for Proportional Representation* 
 merit close consideration and possess great attractions, especi- 
 ally in view of their very favourable reception from Nationalists 
 in Ireland. My own feeling is that such novel proposals 
 may overload a Bill which, however simply it be framed, 
 will provoke very long and very warm discussion. If the 
 system were to be regarded by the present minority as a real 
 safeguard for their interests, its establishment, on tactical 
 grounds alone, would be worth any expenditure of time and 
 trouble ; but, if they accept the assumption that existing 
 parties in Ireland are going to be stereotyped under Home Rule, 
 and then point to the paucity of Unionists in all parts of 
 Ireland but the north-east of Ulster, they can demonstrate that 
 no practicable enlargement of constituencies could seriously 
 influence the results of an election. My own view, already 
 expressed, is that, provided we give Ireland sufficient freedom, 
 wholly new parties must, within a short time, inevitably be 
 formed in Ireland, and the old barriers of race and religion 
 be broken down, and, therefore, that all expedients devised 
 on the contrary hypothesis will eventually prove to be needless 
 and might even prove unpopular and inconvenient. On the 
 other hand, merits are claimed, with a great show of reason, 
 for Proportional Representation, which are altogether inde- 
 pendent of the protection of minorities from oppression. 
 It is claimed that the system brings forward moderate men of 
 all shades of opinion, checks party animus, and steadies the 
 policy of the State. But I think that a free Ireland should 
 be the judge of these merits. At present the bulk of the 
 people do not understand the subject, and need much educa- 
 tion before they can appreciate the issue. 
 
 Meanwhile, the conventional party system, based on con- 
 ventional constituencies, will, to say the least, do no more harm 
 to Ireland than to any other State in the Empire. Any minor 
 defects will be infinitesimal beside the vast and beneficial change 
 wrought by responsible government. 
 
 * See Pamphlet No. 17, published by Proportional Representation Society, 
 and an excellent paper by Mr. J. F. "Williams in " Home Rule Problems."
 
 334 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN THE TWO HOUSES. 
 
 It is essential to provide for this, and it would be difficult 
 to better the proposal in the Bill of 1893 : that after two years, 
 or an intervening dissolution, the question should be decided 
 by a joint vote in joint session. 
 
 MONEY BILLS AND RESOLUTIONS. 
 To originate in the Lower House on the motion of a Minister. 
 
 POLICE. 
 
 The Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan 
 Police should be under Irish control from the first. The 
 former force will undoubtedly have to be reconstituted, and 
 its reconstitution, as an ordinary Civil Police, ought to be 
 undertaken by the Irish Government, but the financial interests 
 of " retrenched " officers and men should be safeguarded in 
 the Bill itself. 
 
 JUDGES. 
 
 All future appointments should be made by the Irish Govern- 
 ment, without the suspensory period of six years named in 
 the Bill of 1893. Present Irish Judges should retain their 
 appointments, as in both previous Bills. The precedent of 
 Canada, where provincial Judges, unlike the State Judges of 
 Australia, are appointed and paid by the Federal Government, 
 is certainly not relevant. 
 
 LAW COURTS. 
 
 The Federal analogy, except in one particular noticed under 
 the next heading, has no application to Ireland. Only one 
 provision of any importance is needed, namely, that Appeals, 
 in the last resort, should be to the Judicial Committee of the 
 Privy Council instead of to the House of Lords. The Judicial
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 335 
 
 Committee is the final Court of Appeal for the whole Empire, 
 and, strengthened by one or more Irish Judges, should hear 
 Irish Appeals. It is true that the tribunal has been subjected 
 to some criticism lately, especially from Australia. Federal 
 States naturally wish to secure pre-eminent authority for their 
 own Supreme Courts. But the tribunal is, on the whole, 
 popular with the colonial democracies, and the argument from 
 distance and expense does not apply to Ireland. At the end 
 of an interesting discussion at the last Imperial Conference, in 
 which suggestions were put forward for strengthening the 
 Judicial Committee by Colonial Judges, it was agreed that new 
 proposals should be made by the Imperial Government for 
 an Imperial Final Court of Appeal in two divisions, one for 
 the United Kingdom, another for the Colonies. If that step 
 is taken, the position of Ireland will need fresh considera- 
 tion.* 
 
 DECISION or CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS, f 
 
 The validity of an Irish Act which has received the Royal 
 Assent will, like that of a Colonial Act which has received 
 the Royal Assent, be determined in the ordinary course by 
 the Irish Courts, with an ultimate appeal to the Judicial 
 Committee, which should be strengthened for the occasion by 
 one or more Irish Judges. But both the previous Home Rule 
 Bills made the convenient provision that the Lord-Lieutenant 
 should have the power of referring questions of validity arising 
 on a Bill, before its enactment, to the Judicial Committee 
 of the Privy Council for final decision. There is a useful 
 Canadian precedent for this provision, in the Imperial Act 
 passed in 1891, for giving the Governor-General in Council 
 power, in the widest terms, to refer, inter alia, questions touch- 
 ing provincial legislation to the Supreme Court of Canada, 
 with an appeal from it to the Judicial Committee. J To 
 follow this precedent would not involve any Federal com- 
 plications. 
 
 * Cd. 5741, 1911, pp. 46-51. 
 
 t See Appendix and the Bill of 1886, Clause 25 ; Bill of 1893, Clause 22. 
 
 J 54 and 55 Viet., Ch. 25, Sect. 4.
 
 336 THE FBAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 EXCHEQUER JUDGES. 
 
 If Ireland controls her own Customs and Excise, no provision 
 for this tribunal appears to be necessary, unless it be that some 
 counterpart is needed for the Colonial Courts of Admiralty.* 
 The Bill of 1886 (Clause 20) limited the jurisdiction to revenue 
 questions. The Bill of 1893 (Clause 19) widened it to include 
 ''any matter not within the power of the Irish Legislature," 
 or " any matter affected by a law which the Irish Legislature 
 have not power to repeal or alter." The minds of the authors 
 of this clause were evidently affected by the Federal principle 
 which involves two judicial authorities one for Federal, one 
 for provincial matters. There seems to be no reason for embark- 
 ing on any such complications in the case of Ireland. 
 
 SAFEGUARDS FOR EXISTING PUBLIC SERVANTS IN 
 IRELAND, t 
 
 Retrenchment, and in some departments drastic retrench- 
 ment, will be needed in the Irish public service, just as it was 
 needed in the Transvaal after the grant of Home Rule to that 
 Colony. It is highly desirable that statutory provision should 
 be made safeguarding existing interests. No such provision 
 was made in the case of the Transvaal, and some bad feeling 
 resulted. The past responsibility for excessive Civil expendi- 
 ture lies, of course, on Great Britain, as it lay in the case of the 
 Transvaal, and on grounds of abstract justice it would have 
 been fair in that case for Great Britain to have assumed a 
 limited part of the expense of compensating retrenched public 
 servants. The practical objections to such a policy are, how- 
 ever, very great. In this, as in all matters, Ireland will gain 
 more by independence than by financial aid, however strongly 
 justified. All payments should be a direct charge upon the 
 Irish Exchequer, not, as in some cases under the Bill of 1893, 
 upon the Imperial Exchequer in the first instance, with pro- 
 vision for repayment from Ireland. 
 
 * Courts of Admiralty in the Colonies are regulated by Imperial Acts, 
 though by an Act of 1890 large powers were conferred on the Colonies of 
 declaring ordinary Courts to be Courts of Admiralty (see Moore's " Common- 
 wealth of Australia," pp. 11 and 251). 
 
 t See Clauses 27-30 of the Bill of 1886, and Clauses 25-28 of the Bill of 1898.
 
 THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 337 
 
 FINANCE. 
 
 I summarize the conclusions already indicated in previous 
 chapters : 
 
 1. Fiscal independence, with complete control over all Irish 
 taxation and expenditure. 
 
 2. Initial deficit to be supplied by a grant-in-aid, diminishing 
 annually and terminable in a short period, say, seven years. 
 
 3. Future contribution to Imperial services to be voluntary. 
 
 4. Remission to Ireland of her share of the National Debt, 
 and relinquishment by Ireland of her share of the Imperial 
 Miscellaneous Revenue. 
 
 5. Imperial credit for Land Purchase to be extended as 
 before, by loans guaranteed on the Consolidated Fund, under 
 any conditions now or hereafter to be made by the Imperial 
 authorities. 
 
 Loans to the Public Works Commissioners to be optional. 
 
 REPRESENTATION AT WESTMINSTER. 
 To cease. 
 
 CONFERENCE BETWEEN THE IRISH AND IMPERIAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 This is a very important point, because friendly consultation, 
 as at present with the Colonies, will take the place of Irish 
 representation in the Imperial Parliament, and will prove a 
 far more satisfactory means of securing harmony and co- 
 operation. Arrangements similar to those of the Imperial 
 Conference, only more precise and efficient, and of a permanent 
 character, should be made for consultation between the Irish 
 and British authorities on all subjects where the interests 
 of the two countries touch one another. The need for more 
 frequent consultation with the Colonies is being felt with 
 increasing force, and although no permanent consultation 
 body has yet been created, special ad hoc conferences have 
 recently been held for Defence in 1909, and for Copyright 
 in 1910 in addition to the quadrennial meetings, where a 
 vast amount of varied topics are discussed, and the most 
 valuable decisions arrived at.* 
 
 * See the Precis of Proceedings, Cd. 5741, 1911. 
 
 22
 
 338 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 What the precise machinery should be in the case of Anglo- 
 Irish relations I do not venture to say. The Ministers of the 
 respective countries will be so easily accessible to one another 
 that there would seem to be no need for the frequent attend- 
 ance of a powerful personnel at joint meetings. But a Standing 
 Committee, with a small official staff, would be necessary. 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT . * 
 
 For amendment of the Home Rule Act itself it is not possible 
 to make any statutory provision. Like all Constitutional 
 Acts, it will only be alterable by another Imperial statute, 
 which, if it were needed, should be promoted by Ireland. But 
 one of the most important clauses in the Act itself will be 
 that defining Ireland's power to amend her own Constitution 
 without coming to Parliament. I venture to repeat the view 
 that this power should be as wide as possible, consistently with 
 the maintenance of the Imperial authority, and subject, of 
 course, to provisions prescribing (1) a time-limit for the initial 
 arrangements ; (2) the method of ascertaining Irish opinion ; 
 and (3) the majority in the Legislature, or in the electorate, or 
 in both, necessary to sanction a constitutional change. f If 
 a Home Rule Constitution, passed into law in the heat of a 
 party fight at Westminster, proves to be perfect, a miracle will 
 have been performed unparalleled in the history of the Empire. 
 At this moment a Committee of Ireland's ablest men of all 
 parties should be at work upon it, with an instructed public 
 opinion behind them. So only are good Constitutions made, 
 and even the very best need subsequent amendment. 
 
 * See pp. 225-227. 
 
 t See Section 128 of the Australia Constitution Act, 1900, and Section 152 
 of the South Africa Act, 1909.
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Is it altogether idle to hope that some such body will yet 
 come into existence, if not in time to influence the drafting of 
 the Bill, at any rate to bring to bear upon its provisions the 
 sober wisdom, not of one party only in the State, but of all ; 
 and so, if it were possible, to give to the charter of Ireland in 
 her " new birth of freedom " the sanction of a united people ? 
 
 Home Rule will eventually come. Within the Empire, the 
 utmost achieved by the government of white men without 
 their own consent is to weaken their capacity to assume the 
 sacred responsibility of self-government. It is impossible to 
 kill the idea of Home Rule, though it is possible, by retarding 
 its realization, to pervert some of its strength and beauty, 
 and to dimmish the vital energy on which its fruition depends. 
 And it is possible in the case of Ireland, up to and in the very 
 hour of her emancipation, after a struggle more bitter and 
 exhausting than any in the Empire, to heap obstacles in the 
 path of the men who have carried her to the goal, and on whom 
 in the first instance must fall the extraordinarily difficult and 
 delicate task of political reconstruction. They will be on their 
 mettle in the eyes of the world to prove that the prophets of 
 evil were wrong, to show sympathy and inspire confidence in 
 the very quarters where they have been most savagely 
 traduced and least trusted, and they will have to exhibit 
 dauntless courage in attacking old abuses and promoting new 
 reforms. They will need their hands strengthened in every 
 possible way. 
 
 The help must come and it cannot come too soon from 
 the working optimists of Ireland, from the hundreds of men 
 and women, of both parties and creeds, who are labouring 
 outside politics to extirpate that stifling undergrowth of 
 pessimism which runs riot in countries denied the light and air 
 of freedom. All these people agree on the axiom that Ireland 
 has a distinct individual existence, and that her future depends 
 
 339
 
 340 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 upon herself. No one should dare to stop there. Let him 
 who feels impelled to stop there at any rate act with open 
 eyes. In expecting to realize social reconstruction without 
 political reconstruction however divergent the aims may now 
 seem to be he expects to achieve what has never been 
 achieved in any country in the Empire, and to achieve this 
 miracle in the very country which has suffered most from 
 political repression, and possesses the most fantastic system 
 of government to be found in the King's dominions. The 
 thing is impossible, and if at bottom he feels it to be so, and 
 inclines sadly to the view that political servitude is but the 
 least of two evils, I would only venture to suggest this : Is it 
 not a finer course to stake something on a risk run in every 
 white community but Ireland rather than to face the cer- 
 tainty of half achievement ? And is it not, after all, a sound 
 risk to trust the very men who now respond to the appeal for 
 self-reliance, mutual tolerance, and united effort in their 
 private affairs, not to renounce these qualities and abuse the 
 rights of citizenship when the public affairs of their country 
 are under their own control ? 
 
 As for the risk to Great Britain, I have only this last word 
 to say : Let her people, not for the first time, show that they 
 can rise superior to the philosophy, as fallacious in effect as 
 it is base and cowardly in purpose, which sets the safety of a 
 great nation above the happiness and prosperity of a small 
 one. Within the last few weeks the wheel has turned full 
 circle, and the almost inexplicable contradiction which has 
 existed for so long between Unionism and Imperialism has 
 been illuminated with a frank cynicism rare in our public life. 
 It is being said that the freedom given to Canada cannot be 
 given to Ireland, because the separation from the Empire 
 theoretically rendered possible by such a step would be im- 
 material in the case of Canada, which is distant, but perilous in the 
 case of Ireland, which is near. If this be Imperialism, it should 
 btink in the nostrils of every decent citizen at home and abroad. 
 
 It is true, to our shame, that, by little more than an accident, 
 Canada obtained the freedom which gave her people harmony, 
 energy, and wealth in the teeth of this mean and selfish 
 doctrine. But Lord Durham took a higher view. Let me 
 recall the memorable words which he added to his long and
 
 CONCLUSION 341 
 
 brilliant argument for liberty as a source, not only of domestic 
 regeneration, but of affection and loyalty to the Motherland : 
 " But at any rate our first duty is to secure the well-being of our 
 colonial countrymen ; and if, in the hidden decrees of that 
 wisdom by which this world is ruled, it is written that these 
 countries are not for ever to remain portions of the Empire, 
 we owe it to our honour to take good care that, when they 
 separate from us, they should not be the only countries on 
 the American continent in which the Anglo-Saxon race shall 
 be found unfit to govern itself." 
 
 Lord Durham was doubly right ; in his prophecy of the closer 
 union liberty would promote, and in elementary law which 
 he laid down, of moral obligation which, whatever the result, 
 he held superior to dynastic calculations. It is a fact of 
 ominous significance that the intellectual successors of the 
 men who most hotly repudiated both these doctrines in 1838 
 are being driven by pressure of their Irish views to revive that 
 repudiation in 1911, and to revive it in the midst of the most 
 effusive protestations of the need for still closer union with a 
 Colony which would either have undergone the fate of Ireland 
 or have ceased to be a member of the Empire if their philosophy 
 had triumphed. I do not believe there is any conscious cant 
 in that flagrant contradiction, but I do firmly believe that so 
 long as their error about Ireland poisons in them the springs 
 of Imperial thought, some element of fallacy lies in any 
 Imperial policy they undertake. In common prudence, at 
 any rate, they should avoid telling Canada, while beckoning 
 her nearer to the heart of the Empire, that they only gave 
 her freedom because she was so far. 
 
 But I rely still on an awakening, on a fundamental change 
 of spirit. The Empire owes everything to those who have 
 disputed, sometimes at the cost of their lives, illegitimate 
 authority. Some day the politicians who now spend sleepless 
 nights with paste and scissors in ransacking the ancient files 
 of the world's Press for proofs that Mr. Redmond once used 
 words signifying that he aimed at " separation " whatever 
 that phrase may mean will regret that they ever demeaned 
 themselves by such petty labour, and will place Mr. Redmond 
 among the number of those who have saved the Empire from 
 the consequences of its own errors.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 COMPARATIVE TABLE, SHOWING THE PRINCIPAL 
 
 PROVISIONS OF THE HOME RULE BILLS OF 
 
 1886 AND 1893 
 
 HOME RULE BILL OF 1886. HOME RULE BILL OF 1893. 
 THE IRISH LEGISLATURE. 
 
 To consist of the Crown and 
 Two Orders, sitting together, and 
 unless either Order demands a 
 separate vote, voting together. 
 
 1. First Order, to consist of 
 (a) 75 members elected on a 25 
 franchise from a new set of con- 
 stituencies. Term of office, ten 
 years. (6) 28 Peerage members, 
 to give place by degrees to elec- 
 tive members as in (a). 
 
 2. Second Order, 204 mem- 
 beres elected as at present. Two 
 from each constituency (with an 
 alteration in the case of Cork). 
 
 Dissolution at least every five 
 years. 
 
 To consist of the Crown and 
 Two Houses, sitting separately. 
 
 1. Council, of 48 Councillors 
 elected on a 20 franchise from 
 a new set of constituencies. Term 
 of office, eight years. 
 
 2. Assembly of 103 members 
 elected as at present. 
 
 Dissolution at least every five 
 years. 
 
 Money Bills and votes to 
 originate in the Assembly. 
 
 DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN ORDERS OR HOUSES. 
 
 After three years or a dissolu- 
 tion question to be decided by 
 oint vote. 
 
 After two years or a dissolu- 
 tion question to be decided by 
 Joint vote in joint session. 
 
 RESTRICTIONS ON IRISH LEGISLATURE. 
 1. Imperial Matters. 
 
 No power to make laws about 
 The Crown, War or Peace, 
 Army or Navy, Volunteers or 
 Militia, Prize or Booty of War, 
 Treaties, Titles, Treason, Natur- 
 alization, Trade or Navigation, 
 Lighthouses, etc., Coinage, Copy- 
 right, Patents, Post Office (ex- 
 cept within Ireland). 
 
 Nor with : the Lord - Lieu - 
 tenant, conduct as Neutrals, 
 Extradition, Trade-marks, nor 
 (for six years) Post Office in or 
 out of Ireland. 
 
 But Trade within Ireland and 
 inland Navigation conceded to 
 Ireland. 
 
 342
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 343 
 
 2. Irish Matters. 
 
 (1) Establishing or endowing 
 any religion or imposing disabili- 
 ties or conferring privileges on 
 account of religion, or affecting 
 the undenominational constitu- 
 tion of National schools, etc. 
 
 (2) Impairing rights or prop- 
 erty of corporations, without 
 address for both Orders and 
 consent of Crown. 
 
 (1) Ditto, ditto, but more ex- 
 plicit and far-reaching. 
 
 (2) Ditto, ditto, or " without 
 due process of law " and com- 
 pensation. 
 
 (3) Depriving anyone of life, 
 liberty, or property without due 
 process of law in accordance with 
 settled precedents, or denying 
 equal protection of laws, or taking 
 property without just compensa- 
 tion. 
 
 (4) Imposing disabilities or 
 conferring privileges on account 
 of birth, parentage, or place of 
 business. 
 
 (5) (For three years) respecting 
 relations of landlord and tenant 
 or the purchase and letting of 
 land generally. 
 
 IRISH REPRESENTATION IN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT. 
 
 To cease altogether (except in 
 the case of a proposed alteration 
 of the Home Rule Act). 
 
 Ireland to send 80 members 
 to Westminster (instead of 103). 
 Peers as before. 
 
 EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY. 
 
 The Crown, as represented by the Lord-Lieutenant, acting in 
 Irish affairs with the advice of an Irish Cabinet responsible to 
 the Irish Legislature. 
 
 POWER OF VETO ON IRISH LEGISLATION. 
 
 To be held by Lord-Lieu- 
 tenant (acting normally on the 
 advice of Irish Cabinet ?), but 
 subject to instructions from Im- 
 perial Government. 
 
 To be held by Lord-Lieu- 
 tenant, acting on advice of Irish 
 Cabinet, but subject to instruc- 
 tions from Imperial Govern- 
 ment.
 
 344 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 FINANCE. 
 
 1. Taxation. 
 
 Customs and Excise still to be 
 levied by Imperial Parliament 
 and collected by Imperial offi- 
 cers. All other taxes to be 
 under Irish control. 
 
 (1) For six years all existing 
 taxes to continue to be imposed 
 by Imperial Parliament and col- 
 lected by Imperial officers. 
 
 Ireland to have power to 
 impose additional taxes of 
 her own. 
 
 (2) After six years, Customs 
 and Excise to remain Imperial 
 taxes ; all others to be under 
 Irish control. But Excise to be 
 collected, though not levied, by 
 Ireland. 
 
 2. Ireland's Revenue. 
 
 Gross revenue collected in Ire- 
 land from Imperial and Irish 
 taxes and Crown Lands, etc. ; 
 plus an Imperial grant towards 
 the cost of Irish Police. (Total 
 cost at that time 1,500,000 : 
 Ireland to pay 1,000,000, Trea- 
 sury any surplus over 1,000,000, 
 until cost reduced to that point.) 
 
 (1) True Irish revenue from 
 Imperial taxes (i.e., with allow- 
 ance made for duties collected in 
 Ireland on articles consumed in 
 Great Britain, and vice versa). 
 
 (2) Revenue from Irish taxes 
 and Crown Lands. 
 
 (3) Imperial grant of one- 
 third of annual cost of Irish 
 Police (equal in first year to 
 486,000). 
 
 3. Ireland's Contribution to Imperial Exchequer. 
 
 (1) For thirty years Ireland 
 to pay fixed annual maximum 
 sums, representing Ireland's 
 share of (a) Army, Navy, Civil 
 List, etc. ; (6) National Debt. 
 Payments not to be increased, 
 but might be diminished. Share 
 for Army, Navy, etc., never to 
 exceed one - fifteenth of total 
 cost. Total payments under these 
 heads for first year, 3,242,000. 
 
 (2) After thirty years, contri- 
 bution to be revisable. 
 
 (1) For six years Ireland to 
 pay one-third of the " true " re- 
 venue raised in Ireland from Im- 
 perial taxes and Crown Lands. 
 (Estimated share for first year, 
 2,276,000, or about one-twenty- 
 eighth of total Imperial expendi- 
 ture.) 
 
 (2) After six years, both 
 method and amount of Ireland's 
 contribution to be revised and 
 settled afresh.
 
 APPENDIX 345 
 
 *A 
 
 4. Contribution to Special War Taxes. 
 
 Optional to Ireland. For six years compulsory on 
 
 Ireland to pay her proportional 
 share of any such tax levied. 
 
 5. Post Office. 
 
 To be taken over by Ireland For six years to remain under 
 under Irish Act. Imperial control. Profit or loss 
 
 on Irish posts to be credited to 
 or debited against Ireland. 
 
 POLICE. 
 
 Dublin Police to be under Im- Both Dublin Police and Con- 
 perial control for two years, stabulary, as long as they should 
 Constabulary, " while that force exist, to be under Imperial con- 
 subsists," to be under Imperial trol. 
 
 control, but Ireland to have Meanwhile an ordinary locally 
 power to create a new force controlled civil police to be 
 under control of local authorities, gradually established by Irish 
 
 Government, and to take the 
 place of the old forces. 
 
 But for six years, Imperial 
 Government to have the power 
 to maintain in existence the old 
 forces, if considered expedient. 
 
 JUDGES. 
 Present Irish Judges to Remain. 
 
 All future Irish Judges to be For six years future Irish 
 appointed by Irish Government. Supreme Court Judges (not 
 
 County Court Judges, etc.) to be 
 appointed by Imperial Govern- 
 ment. After six years by Irish 
 Government. 
 
 LAW COURTS. 
 Constitution to Remain the Same. 
 
 But appeals to the House of 
 Lords to cease ; instead, to the 
 Judicial Committee of the Privy 
 Council. 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS. 
 (As to Validity of Irish Laws, etc.}. 
 
 To be decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 
 (including one or more Irish Judges).
 
 346 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 EXCHEQUER JUDGES. 
 
 Legal proceedings in Ireland All legal proceedings in Ire- 
 by or against Imperial revenue land which touch any matter 
 authorities to be referred, if (financial or otherwise) not within 
 either party wishes, to the Ex- the power of the Irish Legis- 
 chequer Division Judges of the lature to be referred, if either 
 United Kingdom. party wishes, to two Exchequer 
 
 Judges appointed and paid by 
 the Imperial Government. Ap- 
 peal to be to the Judicial Com- 
 mittee of the Privy Council. 
 
 LORD-LlEUTENANT. 
 
 Might be of any Religion. 
 Term of office indefinite. Term of office six years. 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. 
 
 After the first dissolution, After six years, Legislature 
 Legislature to have power to to have power to reconstitute 
 reconstitute Second Order. Assembly. 
 
 REMARKS ON THE FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS. 
 
 The arrangements differed widely in the two Bills. 
 
 The main points of likeness were : (1) That from the first theie 
 was to be a separate Irish Exchequer ; (2) that for all time Ireland 
 was to be denied control over the imposition of Customs and Excise 
 that is to say, over about three-quarters of her revenue as then raised ; 
 (3) that about a third of the cost of the Irish Police was to be paid 
 by the Imperial Government ; (4) that payments due from Ireland 
 to the Imperial Government were to be made a first charge on 
 proceeds of Imperial taxes in Ireland. 
 
 The principal points of difference were : 
 
 1. Under the Bill of 1886, apart from the very important restric- 
 tion of Customs and Excise, Ireland was at once to have freedom 
 to control her own taxation. 
 
 Under the Bill of 1893 (as amended) there was to be a suspensory 
 period of six years during which all existing taxes were to continue 
 to be imposed by the Imperial Government ; but with power to 
 Ireland to add taxes of her own. Amounts of Imperial taxes might 
 be varied, but no new ones imposed, except specially for war. After 
 six years, financial freedom, except in Customs and Excise. Excise, 
 however, was to be collected, though not levied, by Ireland.
 
 APPENDIX 347 
 
 2. " Collected " and " True " Revenue. In 1886, Ireland was 
 credited with all the revenue collected in Ireland from Customs and 
 Excise (i.e., the " gross " revenue from those taxes), but she had 
 to pay the cost of collection herself. 
 
 In 1893 allowance was made for duties collected in Ireland on 
 articles consumed in Great Britain, and vice versa, Ireland being 
 credited only with her " true " revenue that is, revenue from 
 dutiable articles consumed in Ireland. Similar allowances made in 
 the Income Tax account. A joint Anglo-Irish Committee was to 
 settle these adjustments. This system involved a deduction from 
 the first year's gross Irish revenue of nearly two millions. (In 1886 
 the corresponding sum, credited to Ireland, was 1,400,000.) On 
 the other hand, in 1893 the greater part of the cost of collection 
 (235,000) was not to be borne by Ireland. 
 
 3. Imperial Contribution by Ireland. In 1886, a fixed annual 
 maximum, which might be diminished, but could not be exceeded, 
 revisable in thirty years. 
 
 In 1893 (for six years) an annually ascertained quota namely, 
 a third of Ireland's " true " revenue (exclusive of taxes imposed 
 by herself). 
 
 4. Ireland's Budget. Note the important point that under both 
 Bills three-quarters of Irish revenue was derived from Customs 
 and Excise, over which, in 1886, Ireland could exercise no control ; 
 in 1903 only the control given by the presence of eighty members 
 in the House of Commons. In both cases Ireland was to be wholly 
 responsible for her own civil expenditure (except for the existing 
 Police) . Under both Bills Ireland was intended to start with a surplus 
 of about half a million, which may be regarded roughly as the equiva- 
 lent, in both cases, of the Imperial share of the cost of the Irish 
 Police. But note that, in 1886, Ireland being pledged to pay a fixed 
 million of the cost of Police, would obtain no relief until the cost 
 was reduced below a million ; while in 1893, paying two-thirds 
 of the annually ascertained cost, she would obtain relief from 
 any annual reduction. The Police referred to was, of course, the 
 then existing Police, imperially organized and controlled. The 
 new civil Police eventually set up in substitution would be financed 
 and controlled by the Irish Government. The charges, therefore, 
 on the British taxpayer would, it was expected, be a rapidly dimin- 
 ishing one. 
 
 The loss on Irish posts in 1893, debited against Ireland, was 
 estimated at 52,000. 
 
 5. Special War Taxes. Ireland's contribution optional in 1886 ; 
 in 1893, compulsory (at any rate, for six years, which would have 
 included the beginning of the South African War).
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABERCROMBY, Sir R., 57, 129 
 Absentee taxes, in Ireland, 23-30 ; in 
 
 Australasia, 116 
 
 Absenteeism, in Ireland, 12, 51 ; in 
 Prince Edward Island, 75-6 ; in 
 Upper Canada, 80 ; in Lower Canada, 
 85 ; in Australia, 116 
 Acadia. See Maritime Provinces 
 Act of Union, 1800, 60-4, 232-3 
 Administrators, in South Africa, 197 
 Agricultural Co-operation. See Irish 
 Agricultural Organization Society, 
 also 168, 177 
 
 Agricultural Grant, Ireland, 267 
 Agricultural Rates Act, 1896, 267 
 Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, 156, 
 
 306-8 
 Amendment of Constitution, Ireland, 
 
 225-7, 338 ; Colonies, 225-6, 338 
 American Colonies, colonization of, 8-9 ; 
 land tenure in (see Land Tenure) ; 
 mercantile system, 17-18,30; govern- 
 ment of, 22-3, 33 ; Revolution in, 
 30-5, 72, 74. See also United States 
 Anglo-Normans, in Ireland, 6-7 
 Annuities, tenant's. See Land Purchase 
 Armagh, Peep o' Day Boys in, 55 
 Army Act, 1881, 220 (footnote) 
 Army and Navy, 218-9, 329 
 Arnold, Benedict, 40 
 Ashbourne Act, 1885, 309. See also 
 
 Land Acts 
 
 Australian Colonies Act, 1850, 107, 225 
 Australian Colonies Customs Unties 
 
 Act, 1873, 220, footnote 
 Australian Colonies, history of. See 
 Chapter VI., and under names of the | 
 various States ; federation of, as , 
 Commonwealth of Australia, 119. 
 196, 198; finance in, 227-8, 245-6, 
 288, 295-8. See also Commonwealth 
 of Australia Constitution Act, 1900, 
 Constitutions, Federal Systems, Cus- 
 toms and Excise, Subsidies 
 
 Baldwin, Robert, in Upper Canada, 82, 
 
 103 
 
 Balfour, Arthur. 138, 152, 172, 212 
 Balfour, Gerald, 152, 158, 338 
 Baltimore, Lord, 21 
 Barbour, Sir David, on Anglo-Irish 
 
 Finance, 249-57 
 
 348 
 
 Barry, Sir Redmond, 114 
 
 Belfast, 45, 146, 162, 170, 175 
 
 Belgium, cost of Government in, 253 
 
 Berkeley, G. F. H., 178 
 
 Bid well, B., in Upper Canada, 82 
 
 Birrell, Augustine, his Land Act of 
 1909. See Land Acts, Land Tenure, 
 Land Purchase 
 
 Bloemfontein, Convention of, 123 
 
 Boer War of 1880-1881, 125; of 1899- 
 1902,128-9, 133,216 
 
 Bonus to landlords, 310-12, 317. See 
 also Land Purchase 
 
 Boomplatz, battle of, 1848, 123 
 
 Botha, General, 143 
 
 Brand, President, 124 
 
 Bright, John, 69, 71, 213, 308 
 
 British Columbia, finances of, 246, 299 ; 
 Upper Chamber in, 331 
 
 British North America Act, 1867, cita- 
 tions from, 219, 220 (footnote), 225, 
 299, 323, 325 (footnote), 327, 330 
 (footnote) ; 1891, 335. See also 
 Canada 
 
 Buller, Charles, 87, 89, 94-5 
 
 Burgh, Hussey, 36 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 12, 27-9, 34, 59, 74, 77 
 
 Burke, Robert O'Hara, 114 
 
 Butt, Isaac, 71, 135, 171 
 
 Canada, Upper and Lower, history of 
 (see Chapter V. and Introduction, 
 viii, 340-1); relations of, with 
 American Colonies, 72 ; with United 
 States, 80, 87, 92, 101; Union of 
 the two Provinces proposed, 76-8, 
 carried out, 96-104, 106, 192, 194, 
 198, 200-1, 223, and Introduction, 
 viii ; comparison of history with that 
 of Transvaal, 132-5 ; confederation 
 of, as the Dominion of Canada, pro- 
 posed, 82, 96, carried out (1867), 
 97, 193-6 ; finance in, 227-8, 298-9, 
 304. See also Constitutions, Federal 
 Systems, Customs and Excise, Sub- 
 sidies, Guaranteed Loans, British 
 North America Acts, 1867, 1891 
 Carleton, Sir Guy, 73. 129 
 Carnarvon, Lord, 123-4 
 Carolina, plantation of, 9, 10, 23 
 Carson, Sir Edward, Introduction, x 
 Casey, Judge, 115
 
 INDEX 
 
 349 
 
 Castlereagh, Lord, 62, 134, 135 
 Catholic Relief Act, 1778, 36 ; 1793, 
 
 52-3, 55 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 1-4, 11, 103, 206, 
 
 257, 282 
 
 Channel Islands, finance, 288 
 Charlemont, Lord, 16, 46-7, 61 
 Charles LL, King, 9 
 Chartist movement, 88 
 Chatham, Lord, 27, 29-31, 34, 74 
 Chief Secretary, 64, 160; compared with 
 
 Canadian Governor, 102 
 Childers, Hugh, in Prince Edward 
 
 Island, 76 (footnote) ; as Chairman 
 
 of Royal Commission on finance, 239- 
 
 57 
 
 Church Funds, Irish, 271-2 
 Civil List, 328 
 Civil servants, Ireland, 336 ; Transvaal, 
 
 336 
 
 Clare, Earl of. See Fitzgibbon 
 Clergy Reserves, Upper Canada, 82 ; 
 
 Lower Canada, 84-85 
 Cockburn, Sir John, 85 
 Coinage, colonial and Irish powers over, 
 
 219, 220 (footnote) ; Act of 1853, 220 
 
 (footnote) 
 
 Collins, Francis, in Upper Canada, 82 
 Colonial Attorneys Relief Act, 1857, 
 
 222 (footnote) 
 Colonial Courts of Admiralty Act, 1890, 
 
 220 (footnote), 336 (and footnote) 
 Colonial Defence forces, 215-9 (and 
 
 footnote) 
 
 Colonial Laws Validity Act, 222 
 Colonial Marriages Act, 1866, 222 (foot- 
 note) 
 Colonial Naval Defence Act, 1865, 220 
 
 (footnote) 
 Colonial Office, 79 
 Colonial Prisoners' Removal Act, 1869, 
 
 222 (footnote) 
 
 Colonial Probates Act, 1892, 222 (foot- 
 note) 
 
 Commercial Propositions of 1785,43,232 
 Commercial Restrictions, Ireland, 17-9, 
 
 30, 37, 236, 294 ; American Colonies, 
 
 17-8, 30 ; Canada, 78 
 Commonwealth of Australia Constitu- 
 tion Act, 1900, citations from, 219, 
 
 220 (footnote), 296, 324-5 (footnote), 
 
 338 (footnote), 332 
 Conferences, Imperial, 205, 215, 337 ; 
 
 suggestions for, with Ireland under 
 
 Home Rule, 205, 215, 337 
 Congested Districts Board, 152, 176-7 ; 
 
 in Land Purchase, 310, 314 ; under 
 
 Home Rule, 176-7, 317, 319 
 Connecticut, 8-9, 23 
 Constitutional Act, 1791, Canada, 76-9, 
 
 80 
 Constitutional Doubts, settlement of, 
 
 335 
 
 Constitution, Irish, summary of pro- 
 posed, Chapter XV. 
 
 Constitutions : Transvaal, of 1905, 
 130-7 ; of 1906, 137-39, 223-4, 323-4, 
 325 (footnote); United States, 191, 
 193 - 7, 224-5, 227 ; Dominion of 
 Canada, 219, 220, 227, 327, 328, 330, 
 331, 334; Australian States, 107-8, 
 325 (footnote) ; Commonwealth of 
 Australia, 196, 213, 219, 220, 227, 
 332 ; South African Union, 197, 224. 
 See also Federal Systems and 
 individual Colonies 
 
 Continental Congress, 1774, 35 
 
 " Contract " finance, 300, 303-6 
 
 Contribution of Ireland to Imperial 
 services ; in the eighteenth century, 
 26, 231 ; during the Union, 216, 
 234, 237-9, 247, 253-4, 282; under 
 Home Rule, 216, 282, 286-7, 302-3,337 
 
 Convict system, Australia, 74 
 
 Copyright, 219-20 (footnote) ; Imperial 
 Conference on, 337 
 
 Corn Laws, Repeal of, 236 
 
 Cornwallis, Lord, 35, 62 
 
 Courtney, Lord, 333 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 9 
 
 Crown Colony, features of, in Irish 
 Government, 1-2, 64, 144, 157, 179, 
 188, 213, 284, 306 
 
 Crown Lands, revenue from, 275 
 
 Currie, B. W., 249, 252 
 
 Customs and Excise, Ireland, control 
 of, under Home Rule, 227-9, 231-4, 
 275-9, 287-94, 300-1 ; Australia, 227-8, 
 245-6, 288, 295-9, ; Canada, 227-8 ; 
 United States, 227-8 ; in Colonies 
 generally, 254, 288. See also Finance, 
 Federal Systems 
 
 Debt. Irish public, until 1816, 230-3 
 
 Danish invasions, 6 
 
 Declaration of Independence, Irish, 
 38 ; American, 35 
 
 Declaratory Acts for America and 
 Ireland, 23-4, 31, 34, 45 
 
 Defender Society, 55-6 
 
 Deficit, in Irish Revenue, amount of, 
 259-60, 277, 279; method of dealing 
 with, 281-6, 337 
 
 Denmark, agricultural policy in, 237, 290 
 
 Department of Agriculture and Tech- 
 nical Instruction, 152 ; founding of, 
 155-62 ; allusions to, 234, 274, 291, 332 
 
 Derby, Lord, 123 
 
 Derry, Bishop of, 47 
 
 Development Commissioners, grants to 
 Ireland, 274 
 
 Devolution movement, 152 
 
 Devon Commission, 1845, 69 
 
 Dillon, John, 146 
 
 Disagreement between two Chambers 
 of Irish Legislature, 334
 
 350 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 DiBOstabliwhinent of Irish Church, 70, 
 
 103, 154 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 109, 235 
 Dissenters, in Ireland, 9, 19-20, 24, 31 ; 
 
 in American Colonies, 9, 20 ; in 
 
 Canada, 80-2 
 Dublin, 170, 173, 186 
 Duffy, Sir C. Gavan, 114-6 
 Dunraven, Lord, 152, 178 
 Durban, Conference at, for Closer Union, 
 
 156-7, 192 
 Durham, Lord, Introduction, viii, 88-'Jl, 
 
 94-99, 104, 126 
 
 Durham Report, 94-9, 104, 133 
 Dutch East India Company, 120 
 
 Education, Ireland, 71, 170, 174-6, 285 ; 
 
 finance of, 268-9; England, 269; 
 
 Scotland, 269 
 Egerton, H. E., 31, 330 
 Elgin, Lord, 95, 102-3, 105 
 Emancipation, Catholic, 52-3, 57, 62-3, 
 
 88 
 Emigration, from Ireland, 19-20, 31, 
 
 87, 111, 148, 156, 186 
 Emmett, Robert, 83, 86, 135, 171 
 Encumbered Estates Act, 1849, 09, 111 
 Equalization of taxes, in Ireland and 
 
 Great Britain, 234-5, 246 
 Estate duties, assessment to, as test of 
 
 taxable capacity, 240, 258 ; yield of, 
 
 in Ireland, 275-6 
 Estates Commissioners. See Laud 
 
 Purchase 
 
 Eureka Stockade, 1854, 112-3 
 Evicted tenants, 177 
 Executive authority, in Colonies, 221-2, 
 
 323-8 ; in Ireland, under Home Rule, 
 
 221-2, 323-8 
 Executive Council, in Upper Canada, 
 
 79, 81, 100 ; in Lower Canada, 79, 84, 
 
 100 
 Extradition, Colonial powers over, 219 
 
 (and footnote) ; Irish powers over, 
 
 219, 329 
 
 " Family Compact," in Upper Canada, 
 81 ; in the Maritime Provinces, 88 
 
 Famine, Irish, 1847, 69, 103, 236 
 
 Farrer, Lord, 249, 252-6 
 
 " Federal " Home Rule, 188, 192-206, 
 226-7, 294-300 
 
 Federal systems, in general. 192-7 ; 
 Upper Chamber in, 212-3, 229, 300, 
 331-2; division of powers, as in 
 Home, Rule Bill, 223, 330 ; Amend- 
 ment of Constitution, 225-7 ; finance, 
 227-9, 242-6, 294-300; judiciary, 
 334-6 ; settlement of constitutional 
 questions, 335. See also Canada, 
 Australian Colonies, South Africa, 
 United States, Switzerland, Germany, 
 Constitutions 
 
 Fenianism, 70 
 
 Financial relations of Ireland and Great 
 Britain (see Chapters XI., XII., 
 XIII.) ; before the Union, 230-1, 
 290; from the Union to 1896, 232-57; 
 Royal Commission on, 1894-1896, 
 239-57 ; present situation, 178-81, 
 and Chapters XII. and XIII. 
 
 Finance, of the Home Rule Bill, Chap- 
 ter XIII., and summary, 337 
 
 Finance, Colonial. See Federal Sys- 
 tems, and under names of Colonies 
 
 Finance Act, 1894, 222 (footnote) 
 
 Finance Act, 1909, 259, 301 
 
 Finlay, Father T. A., 165 
 
 Fiscal amalgamation, 1817, 233, 289 
 
 Fisher, J., author of " The End of the 
 Irish Parliament," 13, 54 
 
 Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, Introduction, 
 xi, and 49, 59-9, 60, 62, 65, 97, 126, 
 131, 134, 146 
 
 Fitzgibbon, James, 81 
 
 Fitzwilliam, Lord, 53-4 
 
 Flood, Henry, 46-7 
 
 Ford, Patrick, 149 
 
 Fortescue, Hon. J. W., 39-40 
 
 Foster's Corn Law, 51, 236 (footnote) 
 
 Fox, Charles James, on Canada, 78-9 ; 
 on Ireland, 91 
 
 France, Seven Years' War with, 26 ; 
 in Canada, 72-3 ; in American War 
 of Independence, 35 ; effect of, on 
 Ireland, 35; effect of French Revolu- 
 tion on Ireland, 54-5 ; invasions of 
 Ireland, 56 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 31, 33-4 
 
 Free Trade, opinion in Ireland on, 170, 
 290 ; influence of, on Ireland, 235-7. 
 See also Tariff Reform, Customs and 
 Excise 
 
 French-Canadians. See Chapter V., 
 especially pages 72-8, 83-7, 96-7 ; 
 also 121 
 
 Frere, Sir Bartle, 12 1 
 
 Gaelic League, 166-8 
 
 Geelong, 114 
 
 Georgia, 9, 21 
 
 Germany, 147 ; Federal Constitution 
 of, 195, 228 (Zollverein) 
 
 Gladstone. W. E., Irish land reform, 
 68, 70, 99 ; on colonial liberty. 109- 
 11; his Transvaal and Irish policies. 
 125. 128 ; on representation of Ireland 
 at Westminster, 203-11 ; taxation of 
 Ireland, 234-5; on Irish expenditure, 
 282 ; financial schemes in the Homo 
 Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. 300-3, 
 and Appendix ; for details of the 
 Bills generally, see Appendix and in 
 the text passim 
 
 Gourlay, William, in Upper Canada,, 
 82
 
 INDEX 
 
 351 
 
 Governors, in American Colonies, 23, 
 33 ; in the Canadas, 79, 102 ; in the 
 Dominion of Canada, 195, 199; in 
 the Commonwealth of Australia, 195 
 (footnote), 196, 221 
 
 Grattan, Henry, 44, 45, 46, 50, 53 
 
 Grattan's Parliament, Chapter III. 
 
 Greene, General, 40 
 
 Greville's " Memoirs," 94, 103 
 
 Grey, Sir George, in Australasia, 115-7 ; 
 in South Africa, 123-4, 194 
 
 Grote, George, 89, 92 
 
 Guarantee Fund, 267. See also Land 
 Purchase 
 
 Guaranteed Loans, to Ireland (see 
 Land Purchase) ; to the Transvaal 
 and Canada, 318 ; to Crown Colonies 
 and Foreign Powers, 318-9 
 
 Habeas Corpus Act, 330 
 Hamilton, Sir Edward, 238 
 Hancock, John, 35 
 Henderson, Professor G. C., 110 
 Henry VIII., Ireland in the reign 
 
 of, 8 
 
 Hewins, Professor \V. A. S., 293-4 
 Holland, Bernard, 33 
 Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. 
 
 For details, sec Appendix, allusions 
 
 in text passim 
 " Home Rule Problems," edited by 
 
 Basil Williams, Introduction, xiv, 
 
 and pp. 178, 203, 307, 333 
 House of Lords : under the Union, 64 ; 
 
 after Home Rule, 212, 229, 300 
 Howe, Joseph, in Nova Scotia, 88 
 Hume, philosophy of, 59 
 Hume, Joseph, 89, 90, 109 
 Hyde, Dr. Douglas, 166 
 
 Imperial Federation, 204-5 
 
 " In and Out " Clause. 209 
 
 Income Tax, first imposition of, in 
 Ireland, 234-5; assessment to, as test 
 of taxable capacity, 240, 258 ; yield 
 of, in Ireland, 275-6 ; errors in com- 
 puting Irish yield, 278 (footnote) 
 
 India, 12 
 
 Indians, in America, 10 
 
 Industrial Development Associations, 
 165, 168, 290, 292 
 
 Insurance, National, 178, 274, 306 
 
 International Copyright Act, 1886, 220 
 (footnote) 
 
 Ireland Development Grant, 311 
 
 Irish Agricultural Organization Society, 
 162-5 
 
 Irish Council Bill, 1907, 192, 304 
 
 Irish Homestead, 165 
 
 Irish Members at Westminster. See 
 Representation at Westminster 
 
 Irish Universities Act, 1908, 153, 173 
 
 Isle of Man, finance of, 255, 288 
 
 Jamaica, 1, 284 
 
 James, Sir Henry, 330 
 
 Jebb, Richard, 117-8 
 
 Johannesburg, 131, 133 
 
 Judges, Irish, under Home Rule, 334-5 ; 
 
 Exchequer Judges, 336 
 Judicial salaries, Ireland, 273 
 
 Kilmore, 114 
 Kitchener, Lord, 129 
 Kruger, President Paul, 124 
 Kyte, Ambrose, 114 
 
 Labourers (Ireland) Act, 1906, 153, 320 
 
 Labour questions, in Ireland, 170, 178 
 
 Lafontaine, Sir Louis, 103 
 
 Laing's Nek, 125 
 
 Lalor, Peter, 112-3 
 
 Land Acts, Irish, of 1870, 16-7, 68, 70-1, 
 151, 309; 1881, 16-7, 70, 103, 151, 
 309 ; 1885, 309 ; 1887, 70, 151 ; 1891, 
 
 70, 152, 309-10; 1896, 70, 152, 309; 
 1903, 71, 103, 152-3, 155, 310-21 ; 
 1909, 153, 311-21. See also Land 
 Tenure, Land Purchase 
 
 Land Commission, 70 ; cost and control 
 
 of, 273, 303, 317-9 
 Land League, 70 
 Land Purchase in Ireland, Chapter XIV. , 
 
 71, 151, 152-3, 177, 243, 285, 337; 
 in Prince Edward Island, 75, 318 
 
 Land Tenure, in Ireland, 11-17, 51, 55-7, 
 65, 66-70, 143, 151-2, 177, 236-7 ; 
 in America, 10, 15 ; in Prince Edward 
 Island, 13, 75-6, 115, 143; in Upper 
 Canada, 80 ; in Lower Canada, 84-5 ; 
 in Australia, 115-6; in New Zealand, 
 116. See also Land Acts, Laud 
 Purchase 
 
 Lanyon, Sir Owen, 124, 127 
 
 Law, Bonar, 293 
 
 Law Courts, Ireland, 334-5 
 
 Lecky, Professor W. H., Introduction, 
 vi and ix, and 6, 13, 16, 19, 29, 49, 57, 
 183 
 
 Legislative Councils, in America, 23 ; 
 in Upper Canada, 79, 81, 100-2; in 
 Lower Canada, 79, 84, 100 
 
 Legislature, Irish, powers of, general, 
 213-29, 328-30 ; financial powers, 
 Chapter XIII., and 317-21, 337 ; com- 
 position of, 330-4. For restrictions 
 on, see also Safeguards for Minorities 
 
 Legislatures, Colonial, powers and 
 limitations of, general, 215-29. See 
 also Constitutions, Federal Systems, 
 and under names of Colonies 
 
 Leinster. plantations in, 9 
 
 Lieutenant-Governors, in Dominion of 
 Canada, 195, 221 
 
 Limerick. Treaty of, 12, 63 
 
 Local Government Board, cost of, 272 
 
 Local Government, working of, in 
 Ireland, 103, 172-4
 
 352 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, 
 
 103, 154, 158 
 Local taxation, Ireland, 266 ; grants in 
 
 aid of, 266-7, 311 
 Lockor-Lampson, G., Introduction, vi, 
 
 and 65 
 
 Londonderry, Lord, 61 
 Long, Walter, Introduction, x, xi, and 
 
 142, 152 
 Lord-Lieutenant, before the Union, 22- 
 
 3, 32-3 ; under the Union, 64 ; under 
 
 Home Rule, 192, 199, 219, 221, 266, 
 
 324-7, 328. 335 
 Louisburg, capture of, 73 
 Lyttelton, Mr. Alfred, 131-2, 135 
 
 MacDonnell, Lord, 61, 152, 304 
 
 Mackenzie. W. L., in Upper Canada, 
 74, 82, 86-7, 94, 105 
 
 McKenna, Sir J., 238 
 
 McManus, T. B., 115 
 
 Maine, 8 
 
 Majuba, 125, 128 
 
 Malta, 1 
 
 Manitoba, 331 
 
 Maritime Provinces, 72, 75, 88, 95, and 
 Chapter V. See also Nova Scotia, New 
 Brunswick, Prince Edward Island 
 
 Maryland, 8-9, 21 
 
 Massachusetts, 8, 10, 22-3 (and foot- 
 note), 35 
 
 Meagher, T. F., 113-4 
 
 Melbourne, Lord, 94 
 
 Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, 220, 222 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 67, 69. 89, 95 
 
 Milner, Lord, 129, 131, 138-9, 142 
 
 Miscellaneous revenue, Imperial, Ire- 
 land's share of, 280-7 
 
 Mitchel, John, 113-4 
 
 Molesworth, Sir William, 89, 93-4, 109 
 
 Molyneux, on Irish liberty, 31 
 
 Montreal, 74-5, 103 
 
 Montgomery, General, 35, 75 
 
 Moore, W. Harrison, author of " The 
 Commonwealth of Australia," 219 
 
 Morgan's Riflemen, 73 
 
 Morley, Lord, his '' Life of Gladstone," 
 Introduction, x, and 109, 125 ; on 
 Irish Members at Westminster, 209 ; 
 on Clause 7 of the Bill of 1886, 326 
 
 Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast, 
 162, 175 
 
 Municipal Reform Act, 1840, 103 
 
 Munster. plantations in, 9 
 
 Murray, Miss A. E., 17, 235, 293 
 
 Natal, 140, 196 
 
 National Debt, Ireland's contribution 
 
 to, 286-7, 337 
 
 Naturalization, 219, 220 (footnote), 329 
 Naval Agreement, 1911, 218 
 Navigation Acts, 17-18 
 Navies, Colonial. See Colonial Defence 
 
 Forces 
 
 Neilson, John, in Lower Canada, 85 
 Nelson, Wilfred, in Lower Canada, 85 
 Netherlands Government, 121 
 Neutrality, 219, 329 
 New Brunswick, Chapter V., and 72, 
 
 75-6, 88, 97, 194 
 New England, 9, 21, 120 
 Newfoundland, 73, 193-7, 288 
 New Haven, 8 
 
 New Netherlands, plantation of, 9 
 New South Wales, 106-7, 114, 117, 120, 
 
 194, 196 ; finance in, 297-8, 300 
 New Zealand, 106, 108, 115-7, 147, 193, 
 
 197, 217, 288 
 Ninety-two Resolutions, Lower Canada, 
 
 86 
 
 Nixon, Captain John, 35 
 North Carolina, 21 (footnote) 
 Nova Scotia, Chapter V., and 72, 76, 
 
 88, 97, 102, 194 
 
 Oakboys, in Ulster, 16 
 O'Brien, Barry, 178, 213 
 O'Brien, Murrough, 253 
 O'Brien, Smith, 83, 103, 114, 171 
 O'Brien, William, 177, 181, 
 O'Callaghan, Dr., in Lower Canada, 85 
 O'Connell, Daniel, 70-1, 85, 86, 89, 90, 
 
 91, 99, 123 
 
 O'Conor Don, the, 249 
 Octennial Act, 168, 357 
 O'Hara, James, 81 
 Old Age Pensions, 153, 178-9, 181, 273, 
 
 285, 291, 303 
 Oldham, Professor C. H., on Irish 
 
 finance, 234, 262, 270 
 O'Loughlen, Sir Brian, in Victoria, 114 
 " Omnes Omnia " Clause, 209 
 Ontario, Province of, prior to 1867, 
 
 See Canada ; after 1867, see Canada, 
 
 Confederation of, and 194, 196, 331 
 Orange Free State, 120, 123-4, 126, 135, 
 
 196, 285 
 Orange Society, in Ireland, 55, 137, 155, 
 
 184, 187 ; in Canada, 87, 103, 184 ; 
 
 in Australia, 114, 184 
 O'Shanassy, Sir John, in Victoria, 114 
 
 Paley. Dr., Philosophy of, 59 
 Papineau, Louis, in Lower Canada, 47, 
 
 85-7, 94, 105 
 
 Parliamentary parties, Irish, 181-2 
 Parliament, Irish (pre-Union), 24, 43, 
 
 50-8, 61, 62 ; finance under, 230-1, 
 
 290 
 
 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 135, 151, 171 
 Patents, 219 
 Peace of Paris. 26 
 Peel, Sir Robert, on the Repeal of the 
 
 Union, 91-2, 99, 236 
 Peep o' Day Boys, 55 
 Penal Code, 12-4, 26, 36, 55, 57, 65, 72, 
 
 156, 183, 308 
 Penn, William, 9
 
 INDEX 
 
 353 
 
 Pennsylvania, 9, 21 
 
 Pilkington, Mrs., 165 
 
 Pitt, William, 50, 53, 54, 62, 74, 96, 106, 
 135, 232 
 
 Plantations, of Ireland and America, 8-9 
 
 Plunkett House, 164 
 
 Plunkett, Sir Horace, 155, 159 (foot- 
 note), 160, 165 
 
 Police, Irish, present position and cost 
 of, 253, 273 ; under Home Rule, 180, 
 219, 285, 334 
 
 Poor Law (Ireland), 71, 174 
 
 Port Phillip. See Victoria 
 
 Postal Services, Irish, powers over, 220 ; 
 loss on, 243, 275, 286 
 
 Poynings' Act, 24, 45 
 
 Preamble, Home Rule Bill, 323 
 
 Prince Edward Island, 13, 72, 74, 88, 
 97, 115. See also Land Tenure, 
 Land Purchase 
 
 Prize and Booty of War, 219, 329 
 
 Proportional Representation, 333 
 
 Proprietary Colonies of America, 10, 23 
 
 Public Works, Commissioners of, Ire- 
 land, 319-21, 337 
 
 Quakers, 9, 21 
 
 Quarterly Review, 99 
 
 Quebec, town of, 74 
 
 Quebec, Province of, prior to 1791, 
 72-8 ; from 1791 to 1867, see under 
 names of Lower Canada and Canada ; 
 after 1867, see Canada, Confederation 
 of, and 194, 196, 198-200, 208 ; present 
 Constitution of, compared with Irish 
 Home Rule, 198-200, 206, 209 
 
 Quebec Act, 1774, 73-4 
 
 Queensland, 109, 196 ; finance in, 297 
 
 Railways, Ireland, 71, 174 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 8 
 
 Rebellions, Irish, of 1798, 55, 56; of 
 1848, 83, 103 
 
 Recess Committee, action and report 
 of, 155-62 
 
 Reciprocity Agreement, 293 
 
 Redmond, John, 141, 148, 156, 181, 341 
 
 Reform, Parliamentary (Ireland), 45-6, 
 50-8 ; Great Britain, 48, 53, 59, 88 
 
 Repeal of the Union, 70, 91 
 
 Representation at Westminster, of Ire- 
 land, 203-29, 284, 337 ; of American 
 Colonies (proposals for), 34, 205 ; of 
 Canada (proposals for), 77 
 
 Residuary powers, under Home Rule, 
 223. See also Federal Systems 
 
 Retief, Piet, 122 
 
 Revenue, from Ireland. See Financial 
 Relations, Estate Duties, Income Tax, 
 Customs and Excise 
 
 Revenue, "true" and "collected," 
 method of estimating in United 
 Kingdom, 242-6, 27o-8 (and foot- 
 notes) ; in Australia, 242-6, 296 
 
 Revolution, Irish, 1780-2, Chapter II. ; 
 
 American, 1775, Chapter II 
 Rhode Island, 8, 23 (footnote) 
 Road Board, grants to Ireland, 274 
 Roebuck, J. A., 89, 90, 94 
 Rose, Holland, 75 
 Royal Assent, 221, 326-7 
 Ruskin, John, 106 
 Russell, George W., 165 
 Russell, Lord John, on Canada, 87,90, 
 
 91,92,99, 100,102,221 ; on Australia, 
 
 109-10 
 
 Russell, T. W., 159 (and footnote) 
 Rutland, Lord, 54, 77 
 
 Safeguards for Minorities, Ireland, 191, 
 223-5, 329-30; United States, 224, 
 329-30 ; Canada, 225 ; Australia, 225 
 
 St. Lawrence, River, 75 
 
 Salaberry, Colonel, 83 
 
 Sand River Convention, 1852. 123 
 
 Saunderson, Colonel, 156 (footnote), 
 215 (and footnote) 
 
 Scotland, 104, 159 (footnote) ; Home 
 Rule for, 200-3 ; revenue from, and 
 expenditure on, 238, 242 ; police in, 
 253 ; education in, 269 
 
 Selborne, Lord, 142 
 
 Seventh Report of Grievances (Upper 
 Canada), 82, 86 
 
 Seven Years' War, 26, 72 
 
 Sexton, T., 249 
 
 Shepstone, Sir T., 124 
 
 Sinn Fein, 168 
 
 Smith, Adam, 51 
 
 Smith, Sir Harry, 123 
 
 Socialism, in Ireland, Introduction, xiv, 
 144, 170 
 
 South Africa Act, 1909, citations from, 
 140-1, 323, 326, 332, 338 
 
 South African Colonies, history of, 
 see Chapter VII., and under Cape of 
 Good Hope, Transvaal, Orange Free 
 State, Natal ; Federal Union, pro- 
 posed (1859), 117, 123; Conference 
 for Closer Union (1908), 140, 156-7 ; 
 Union of 1909, 140-3, 196-7 ; see also 
 South Africa Act, 1900, Constitu- 
 tions, Federal Systems 
 
 South Australia, 106-7, 116, 196 ; 
 finance in, 297 
 
 Spanish Colonies, 25 
 
 Spirit duty, 234-5, 237-8, 244 
 
 Stamp Act (1765), and Revenue Duties 
 (America), 27, 34-5, 72 
 
 Stanley, Lord, 90-2 
 
 Steelboys, in Ulster, 16 
 
 Subsidies, to Ireland, under Home Rule, 
 281-6, 337 ; to Colonies, 284-5 ; by 
 Federal Governments to subordinate 
 States or Provinces, 296-300, 304 
 
 Suez Canal shares, revenue from, 287 
 
 Supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, 
 204, 221-5, 323, 328
 
 354 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 
 
 Supreme Court, of Australia, 190, 334-5 
 of South Africa, 197, 334-5 ; of 
 Canada, 195, 334-5 
 
 Sutherland. Sir T., 249 
 
 Swift, Dean, 32 
 
 Switzerland, Federal Constitution of 
 195, 331 
 
 Sydney Bulletin, 117, 143 
 
 Tariff Reform, opinion in Ireland on, 
 
 170; effect of, on Ireland, 289, 292-3 ; 
 
 opinion of Professor Hewing on, for 
 
 Ireland, 293-4 
 Tariffs. See Customs and Excise, Free 
 
 Trade, Tariff Reform 
 Tasmania, 106-7, 113, 196; finance in, 
 
 297-8, 300 
 Taxable capacity of Ireland: in 1800, 
 
 232; in 1894,238-57; in 1911,258-60 
 Technical Instruction, Ireland, 161, 175 
 Temperance Reform, Ireland, 177-8, 
 
 292 
 
 Tenant League, 70 
 Ten Resolutions (1837), 87 
 Territorials, Ireland, 118, 218 
 Thompson, Poulett, Lord Sydenham, 
 
 102 
 
 Titles, power of conferring, 219, 329 
 Tone, Wolfe, 54, 56, 57, 62, 73, 76, 86, 
 
 135 
 
 Toronto, 81 
 
 Townshend, Lord, 25, 32 
 Townshend, Charles, 27 
 Town Tenants Act, 153 
 Trade, external, of Ireland, 147-8, 291 
 Trade and Navigation, Colonial and 
 
 Irish powers over, 220, 329 
 Trade-mark, Irish, 165 ; Colonial and 
 
 Irish powers over, 219 
 Transvaal, Introduction, xiv, 120, 
 
 123-43, 196, 318, 336, and whole of 
 
 Chapter VII. See also South African 
 
 Colonies. Constitutions 
 Treason, 219, 329 
 Treasury, Committee on Land Purchase, 
 
 1908, 311 ; Returns (Financial Re- 
 lations), 242-6, 259-60, 264-279 
 Treaties, power of making, 219. 329 
 Trek, the Great, 120-3, 128, 133 
 Trimleston, Lord, 25 
 
 Ulster, plantation of, 8, 9 ; land tenure j 
 in, 15. 52, 55-7 ; emigration from, 15, I 
 19-20, 31, 186; Orange Society in (see | 
 Orange Society) ; comparison with i 
 Canadian minorities, 92, 97-9, 100-2, 
 214; with Transvaal minority, 139, 
 186, 214; views of, with regard to re- 
 presentation at Westminster, 214-5 ; 
 under Home Rule, Introduction, x, 
 xii, 170, 182-7, 302, 333 
 
 Ulster Custom. See Ulster, Land 
 Tenure in 
 
 "Umpirage," of Great Britain, in 
 Canada, 101, 155 ; in Ireland, 155, 208 
 
 " Undertakers," 25, 81 
 
 Union, of Ireland and Great Britain, 
 Chapter IV. ; compared with that of 
 the two Canadas, Introduction, viii, 
 77-8, 96-104, 106, 192, 194, 198, 
 200-1 ; of the Canadas (see Canada) 
 
 United Empire Loyalists, 74-5, 80 
 
 United Irishmen, 54, 56, 76 
 
 United States, relations with Canada, 
 80, 87, 92, 101 ; emigration to, from 
 Ireland, 111, 148; feeling towards 
 Ireland, 148-9 ; Constitution of, 193-5. 
 See also Federal Systems, Constitu- 
 tions, Safeguards for Minorities, 
 Customs, and Excise 
 
 Universities, Irish, 153, 273, 329 
 
 Upper Chamber, Irish, under Homo 
 Rule, 331-2. See also Federal Systems 
 
 Van Diemen's Land. See Tasmania 
 
 Vereeniging, Peace of, 129 
 
 Victoria, Chapter V., and 106-7, 114-5, 
 
 194, 196, 198, 208 ; finance in, 297 
 Virginia, 8, 22 
 Volksraad, 124 
 Volunteers, Ireland (1778-1783). 37, 
 
 44-5, 52, 54, 60-1, 73, 103, 135, 187, 
 
 230. See also Territorials 
 
 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, in Canada, 
 
 89, 94-5, 104; in Australia, 108-9, 116 
 Wakefield, Vicar of, 107 
 Wales, Home Rule for, 199-200 
 War and Peace, power of making, 2 19, 329 
 Washington, General George, 40 
 Wei by, Lord, on Anglo-Irish finance, 
 
 249-56, 280-1, 282. 293 
 Wellington, Duke of, on Ireland and 
 
 Canada, 70, 88. 90, 126 
 Wentworth, William, in Australia, 107, 
 
 114, 120 
 Western Australia, 106-8, 115, 196, 
 
 and Chapter V. 
 West Indies, banishment of Irish to, 9 ; 
 
 grants-iii-aid to, 284 
 Whiteboys, 16, 51, 56, 67, 107 
 Willcocks, Stephen, in Upper Canada, 82 
 William IV., on Canada, 99 
 Williams, Basil. Editor of " Home Rule 
 
 Problems." Introduction, xiv, 203 
 Wills Act, 1861, 222 (footnote) 
 Wilmot. Samuel, in New Brunswick, 88 
 Wyndharn, George, 1.12 ; his Land Act 
 
 of 1903, 71, 152, 310, etc. 
 
 Young, Arthur, on Ireland. 14, 32. 69 
 Young Ireland movement, 71, 114, 135 
 
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 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF BURMA, 1887-1890 ; MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL OF INDIA, ETC. 
 
 With Maps and Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. i6s. net. 
 
 Sir Charles Crosthwaite succeeded the late Sir Charles Bernard 
 as Chief Commissioner of Burma when that officer was compelled 
 by sickness to leave the Province in March, 1887. From that date 
 until December, 1890, he administered Burma, and he had every 
 opportunity, therefore, of knowing what was done. The measures 
 by which, in four years and in a country which has been described 
 by a soldier as " one vast military obstacle," order and law were 
 established, are narrated. After the military measures, without 
 which no attempt at a Civil Government would have been possible, 
 the constitution of the Indian military police and the establishment 
 on a legal basis of the indigenous village system were the chief 
 means of restoring peace. These measures are explained, and the 
 way in which order was gradually evolved out of confusion is told. 
 Separate chapters deal with the Shan States, with the wild Chins on 
 the West between Burma and Bengal, with the Kachins about 
 Mogaung on the North, and the Red Karrus on the South-East. 
 
 MY ADVENTURES IN THE CONGO. 
 
 By MARGUERITE ROBY. 
 
 With Numerous Illustrations and a Map. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 
 las. 6d. net. 
 
 This is a book that casts an entirely new light on the vexed 
 question of Belgian rule in the Congo. The authoress travelled
 
 Mr. Edward A mold's A utumn A nnouncements. 5 
 
 alone with black porters for hundreds of miles through the very 
 districts in the Congo where the alleged Belgian atrocities have been 
 taking place, and the results of her observations, as here set forth, 
 put a somewhat startling complexion upon some views of the situa- 
 tion that have been commonly accepted hitherto. 
 
 Although the conclusions drawn by Mrs. Roby from her travels 
 in Central Africa are such as to set all truly patriotic Britons 
 thinking, this book is no mere political tract. On the contrary, it is 
 a stirring human document, in which humour, pathos, adventure, 
 and indomitable pluck stand out from every page. 
 
 The devotion of " Thomas," the authoress's black boy, who stood 
 by her when everyone else had deserted her, and to whom on more 
 than one occasion she owed her life ; her desperate straits amongst 
 mutinous porters who sought to kill her ; her days and nights of 
 raging fever, alone and delirious in the Bush ; her big-game exploits ; 
 her experiences with savages who had never before clapped eyes on 
 a white woman ; these and innumerable other incidents combine to 
 make this one of the most remarkable books ever penned by 
 traveller. 
 
 The emotions of a lifetime are crowded into this record of a six- 
 months' trek through Darkest Africa. 
 
 A feature that makes the book still more fascinating is the series 
 of splendid photographs taken by the authoress and her black boy 
 during their hazardous journey. 
 
 THE WILDS OF PATAGONIA. 
 
 a "narrative of tbe Sweoisb Ejpeoition to Patagonia, 
 
 Uierra oel tfnego, ano tbe ffalfelano Sslanos 
 
 in 1907*1009, 
 
 By CARL SKOTTSBERG, D.Sc., etc. 
 With Illustrations and Maps. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 155. net. 
 
 Three years after his return from the great Swedish Antarctic 
 expedition in which he played so prominent a part, Dr. Carl Skottsberg, 
 the distinguished naturalist and botanist, set forth once more, with 
 two eminent fellow-scientists, Dr. Quensel and Dr. Halle, to explore 
 the territories of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, of which so little 
 is known to the outside world. This " Swedish Magellanic Expedi- 
 tion," as it was called, not only resulted in many valuable biological, 
 botanical, and geological discoveries, but was also the means of
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 
 supplying Dr. Skottsberg with the material upon which he h 
 founded his book, "The Wilds of Patagonia." Full of interest and 
 excitement are the graphic accounts which the author gives in this 
 volume of the various expeditions made by him in the Falkland 
 Islands, of the hardships he endured in the unknown interior of 
 Tierra del Fuego, of his constant exposure to wind and weather in 
 the heart of Chile, of his visit to Robinson Crusoe's romantic island, 
 and his journeys across the Andes and through the Cordilleras. 
 Dr. Skottsberg writes with humour as well as charm, and while the 
 descriptions of his various adventures and misadventures are amusing 
 as well as thrilling, his pen-pictures of South American scenery are 
 striking and vivid. This book should appeal especially to the 
 naturalist and the traveller, but cannot fail to prove a source of 
 pleasure and interest to the general reader. Its attractive character 
 is further enhanced by a number of illustrations from photographs 
 taken by the author in the course of his travels. 
 
 BRITISH AND GERMAN EAST 
 
 AFRICA. 
 Ubeir Economic ano Commercial Delations. 
 
 By Dr. H. ERODE, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "Tippoo TIB." 
 
 With a Map. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 75. 6d. net. 
 
 In this book Dr. Erode graphically describes the growth and 
 development of British and German territories in East Africa, gives 
 most interesting details as to the trade of the country, the shipping 
 and railway services, etc., and discusses the question of native 
 taxation and the position of native labour. He deals at length with 
 the agricultural position of East Africa, its natural products and 
 resources, the education of its aboriginal inhabitants, and many 
 other matters of paramount importance. The comparison which 
 Dr. Erode draws between the administration and commercial methods 
 and arrangements of Germany and Great Britain respectively is of 
 the greatest possible interest to British readers, and the tables of 
 statistics with which he supplements his arguments must prove 
 of enormous value to all who seek for information on the subject 
 of East Africa.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements 7 
 
 THE KING'S CARAVAN. 
 
 Hcross australta in a MaoGon. 
 
 By E. J BRADY. 
 With Illustrations and Map. One Volume. Demy Svo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 After attaining eminence in the musical and cricket worlds, 
 Australia seems to be rapidly coming to the front in literature. 
 The Sydney Bulletin has for some time been the centre of a group of 
 young Australian-born writers who bid fair to do their country great 
 service by revealing its charms to the world at large through the 
 medium of both poetry and prose. One of the strongest among 
 them is Mr. Brady, whose volume announced above is the outcome 
 of an adventurous driving tour he made a few years ago. Starting 
 from Sydney in a light waggon, he made his way gradually to 
 Townsville in the north of Queensland. The route he took 
 parallel with the coast, but for the most part some way inland 
 enabled him to visit all the places of importance on the way, and 
 to study the conditions of life under great variations of climate. 
 The result of his observations, given with much dry humour and 
 interspersed with interesting yarns, will be a revelation to English 
 readers, and probably very largely so to Australians. The trip was 
 not without its dangers, for the veneer of civilization is in parts still 
 somewhat thin, while there were also tornados, snakes, alligators, 
 and the peculiarly Australian terror of getting lost. 
 
 FROM PILLAR TO POST. 
 
 By Lieut.-Colonel H. C. LOWTHER, D.S.O., M.V.O., 
 
 SCOTS GUARDS. 
 
 With Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 155. net. 
 
 Colonel Lowther is already well known as a soldier and a 
 diplomatist. He has held a commission in the Scots Guards for 
 over twenty years, has served with distinction in the last South 
 African War, and has held an important appointment in the Intelli- 
 gence Department of the War Office, In 1905 he accompanied the 
 Diplomatic Mission to Fez, and for the next four years filled the 
 responsible position of Military Attache at Paris, Madrid, and 
 Lisbon. Colonel Lowther, who is a brother of the present Speaker 
 of the House of Commons, has recently been appointed Military 
 Secretary to H.R.H. The Duke of Connaught, who is shortly to take 
 up his duties as Governor-General of Canada. In his volume of 
 personal reminiscences, "From Pillar to Post," Colonel Lowther
 
 8 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 shows himself not only as a soldier and a diplomat, but also as an 
 explorer, a world-wide traveller, and a sportsman, possessing great 
 powers of observation, a facile and gifted pen, and a keen sense of 
 humour. In a light and breezy style he describes his travels all 
 over the world from Crete to Morocco, from Ceylon to East Africa. 
 He narrates his experiences of cattle-ranching in America and of 
 lion-hunting in Somaliland, and gives a most interesting account of 
 his adventures in times of peace and war, on active service in South 
 Africa, and on manoeuvres at home. The volume is illustrated 
 throughout by original photographs taken by the author. 
 
 MY LIFE STORY. 
 
 By EMILY, SHAREEFA OF WAZAN. 
 With Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Some forty years ago there was a considerable stir in European 
 circles in Morocco, and in London as well, when the news was 
 published that a young Englishwoman was about to marry the Grand 
 Shareef of Wazan, who is the Ecclesiastical Head of Morocco. 
 There was a violent discussion in the London Press, many people 
 going so far as to protest against the intended marriage. Now, in 
 1911, the Grand Shareef is no more, but his widow is still living 
 in Morocco, and, at the request of their many friends in Europe and 
 America, has set down the story of her life. It may be safely 
 said that her experiences have not been paralleled by any European 
 woman, and that she has been brought face to face with the intimate 
 seclusion of the Moorish woman's life, even while maintaining her 
 original faith. The story of her life has been edited by Mr. S. L. 
 Bensusan, and Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham has written a 
 preface. The book is dedicated by permission to Princess Henry 
 of Battenberg, and will contain many original illustrations. 
 
 PERU OF THE TWENTIETH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 By PERCY F. MARTIN, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " MKXICO OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY," ETC. 
 
 With 32 pages of Illustrations and a Map. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 
 
 155. net. 
 
 Of all the South American Republics, perhaps Peru ranks as the 
 most interesting, not only on account of its romantic history and the
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements 9 
 
 extremely picturesque nature of its people, but because its future is, 
 by general consent of those travellers who have sufficiently studied 
 the subject, one of the most brilliant and likely to prove one of the 
 most permanent. 
 
 Of the many volumes upon Peru which have been issued from 
 time to time, the economic student has sought in vain for a complete 
 account of the Republic's commercial and industrial conditions, and 
 thus a new work from the pen of an acknowledged authority upon 
 this part of South America will be especially welcome. 
 
 Herein will be found a careful, well-considered, and painstaking 
 account of the Republic's present condition and future prospects. 
 The writer has studied the country very closely and very carefully ; 
 and it was generally admitted in Peru at the time of his visit last 
 year that he actually travelled more extensively throughout the State, 
 and looked more deeply and critically into its economic resources, 
 than any author who had latterly visited it. 
 
 The result is a volume literally crammed with valuable first-hand 
 information about the leading industries. The many different rail- 
 ways are described fully. The copper, gold, and other mines are care- 
 fully dealt with. The sugar, guano, rubber, oil, and cotton industries 
 are faithfully depicted and frequently illustrated, and new mercantile 
 prospects of every description are foreshadowed. 
 
 SALVADOR OF THE TWENTIETH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 By PERCY F. MARTIN, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " MEXICO OF THB TWENTIETH CENTURY," ETC. 
 
 With 32 pages of Illustrations and a Map. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 
 
 155. net. 
 
 Of late months the smaller Latin- American States those forming 
 what is known geographically as " Central America "- - have 
 attracted a great amount of attention, principally owing to the 
 attempt made by the United States to force an alliance, commercial 
 and financial, with them. Hitherto not a single book has been 
 written regarding the most important, because most settled and most 
 progressive, of these States Salvador and the present volume will 
 therefore meet with more than ordinary attention. This work is 
 from the pen of Mr. Percy F. Martin, F.R.G.S., the author of several 
 well-known publications, most of which (at least those devoted to 
 Argentina and Mexico) have received the cachet of "standard works" 
 upon their particular subjects. Mr. Martin has probably seen -more
 
 io Mr, Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 of Latin- America than any living writer; and he has made this 
 particular portion of the world his careful and special study. 
 " Salvador of the Twentieth Century " will afford a complete descrip- 
 tion of the Republic ; will show its gradual emancipation from the 
 thraldom of the Spanish yoke ; its early struggles against annexation 
 by more powerful neighbours ; its commercial accomplishments and 
 possibilities in fact, it will afford a thorough insight into a little- 
 known but extremely interesting land with vast potentialities. 
 
 Mr. Martin, who travelled extensively throughout the Republic, 
 and was accorded every facility by the Government for making his 
 enquiries and investigations untrammelled by official interference, 
 has shown us in these pages an unexpectedly impressive and attrac- 
 tive picture of Central American life and progress, which, being 
 assisted by a number of capital illustrations, should prove a welcome 
 addition to Latin-American literature. 
 
 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA. 
 
 By Mrs. M. A. HANDLEY. 
 
 With Numerous Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 
 i2s. 6d. net. 
 
 " Roughing it in Southern India " is just what its name implies 
 a book of travel, but with such a refreshingly picknicky air about it 
 as lifts it quite out of the common rut of such books. The work is 
 an account of the writer's journeyings with her husband through the 
 wilder forest tracts of Coimbatore, the Wynad, and Malabar vast 
 districts, each of them in the course of his duties as an officer of the 
 Madras Woods and Forests Department ; it relates a story of adven- 
 ture and novel experience in pursuance of work and shikar with all 
 the incidental predicaments and obstacles. It describes encounters, 
 sought and unsought, with wild animals ; dealings with quaint jungle- 
 people ; excitements of travel along bad roads and no roads ; difficul- 
 ties in great variety, all of which had to be got through and over 
 somehow. The manner in which these difficulties are portrayed 
 gives a vivid human interest to every page, the whole being sketched 
 in with an enviable lightness of touch, and clearly shows that nerve 
 without nerves is indispensable to make such a day-after-day life as is 
 here depicted possible, to say nothing of enjoyable. To a person 
 hampered with nerves it could be no better than a series of night- 
 mares. 
 
 The book gives one a pleasant feeling that the day has gone by 
 when Englishmen in India thought it fine to speak slightingly of, and 
 even to, natives as " niggers " a manner of speech as ignorant as it 
 is insulting. 

 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. u 
 
 THE LIFE OF A TIGER. 
 
 By S. EARDLEY-WILMOT, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "FOREST LIFE AND SPORT IN INDIA. 
 
 With nearly 150 Original Illustrations. One Volume. Medium 8vo. 
 7S. 6d. net. 
 
 In his popular work, " Forest Life and Sport in India," published 
 last autumn, Mr. Eardley-Wilmot devoted a chapter to the habits of 
 tigers. This, however, by no means exhausted his material, but it 
 aroused much interest in an enthralling subject and paved the way 
 for the present volume. The author has cast his work in the form 
 of a life-history of an individual tiger from birth until, owing to the 
 inroads of civilization into his ancient preserves, he becomes a man- 
 eater and is finally shot. It would be difficult to over-emphasise the 
 fascination of this tale, which not only records the vie intime of 
 the tiger family, but introduces the whole life of the jungle in a 
 series of vivid and kaleidoscopic pictures. The attractions of the 
 book are enhanced by about 150 thumb-nail sketches by the author's 
 daughter, as well as by reproductions of some of Mrs. Eardley- 
 Wilmot's charming and artistic photographs. 
 
 THE SPORT OF SHOOTING. 
 
 By OWEN JONES, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "TEN- YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING," ETC. 
 
 With Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. los. 6d. net. 
 
 This is an informative volume of absorbing interest and utility to 
 the ever-increasing army of shooting-men, and to those many others 
 who cherish an innate hankering after shot-gun sport. While the 
 seasoned sportsman cannot fail to glean many a useful idea, the 
 chief object of the book is to cater sympathetically (at the same time 
 avoiding technical phraseology) for the beginner, whether he be an 
 eager youngster or one whose opportunities have come with riper 
 years to put him from the first on the right track, and save him 
 the endless disappointments of unguided inexperience. It explains 
 those perplexing questions which undermine confidence and account 
 for disheartening failures, puts him in the way of meeting each 
 difficulty as it conies, assists him in laying out his money to good 
 advantage, in buying a gun, cartridges, or dog : taking a shoot, 
 engaging a keeper, and managing them both : or in distributing 
 appropriate tips. Thus, perceiving the why and wherefore of this 
 or that all-important detail of the ropes of shooting, he will be
 
 12 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 resourceful, self-reliant, and independent of others for the goodness 
 of his sport ; find abundance of healthy recreation in the making 
 of a modest bag ; by his own wise woodcraft cancel mere deficiencies 
 of marksmanship ; and last, but not least, whether as guest or host, 
 add tenfold to his own enjoyment and that of his companions. 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF THE HOLY 
 LAND. 
 
 By Dr. CHARLES LEACH, M.P. 
 With Numerous Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. net. 
 
 Avoiding technical terms and scientific descriptions, the author 
 has produced a volume that should be welcomed by men and women 
 in every country who have even a remote interest in the Bible and 
 the land in which it was produced. 
 
 The writer has made nine visits to Palestine during the last 
 twenty years, and has delivered lectures upon it in many of the 
 large towns of England. He takes the reader on a tour to the Holy 
 Land, and travels with him to the principal places of Biblical 
 interest. He describes many of the chief towns in such terms that 
 the reader not only sees them as they are to-day, but can picture 
 them as they were in the far-off first century. He describes the 
 manners and customs of the people, the physical features of the 
 country, the rivers and lakes of Palestine, and some of the remark- 
 able historic events which have made the land famous throughout 
 the world. 
 
 Those who have been to the Holy Land will welcome this book, 
 whilst those who have not been so fortunate will profit greatly from 
 its pages. 
 
 THE GRAVEN PALM. 
 
 H /l&anual of tbe Science of palmistry 
 
 By Mrs. ROBINSON. 
 With about 250 Original Ilhistrations. Medium Svo. los. 6d. net. 
 
 This work is the result of nearly twenty years' practical experience, 
 and the careful examination of many thousands of hands. The
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 13 
 
 illustrations are drawn by Mrs. Robinson herself, and are in every 
 case taken from hands which she has herself read. The great majority 
 of the lines given are entirely original i.e., are not to be found in any 
 known work upon the Science of Palmistry. 
 
 This book will enable those who study it to read character cor- 
 rectly from the shapes of the hands and the comparative lengths of 
 fingers and phalanges ; to understand the values of the different 
 mounts, as bearing upon the character and life ; and, by the full and 
 comprehensive delineation of the six principal and the many chance 
 lines upon the hand, to understand and read correctly the events of 
 their own past and future, as given by the lines on the Mount of 
 Venus in particular, and also in a minor degree by the lines of fate, 
 fortune, and health. 
 
 There are also at the end of the book several photographs of the 
 hands of well-known and celebrated people. 
 
 SOCIETY SKETCHES 
 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 AUTHOR OK "SOME PROBLEMS OF EXISTENCE." 
 
 With Photogravure Portraits. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 This book deals with some features and figures of the eighteenth 
 century which have hitherto escaped any detailed treatment, and 
 with certain aspects of familiar persons which have been unduly 
 overlooked. The Virtuosi who founded the Royal Society, but also 
 called into existence a host of scientific quacks and charlatans ; the 
 Scowrers, and their successors the Mohocks, who infested the 
 streets of London at the beginning of the eighteenth, and the High- 
 waymen who survived into the nineteenth century, are discussed in 
 its pages. An essay is devoted to the fashionable Wits of the period, 
 and another throws new light upon the inner history of the Macaronis. 
 Tradition represents these as mere brainless fops, but the author 
 shows that this reproach belongs rather to their later imitators than 
 to the Macaronis of 1764. 
 
 Governor Pitt, grandfather of the first Lord Chatham, the brilliant 
 scapegrace "Etheldreda" (third Viscountess Townshend), the "Mad 
 Duchess " of Queensberry, and that clever oddity Soame Jenyns, also 
 find a place in the book, while new aspects of even such well-known 
 characters as Horace Walpole and Hannah More are revealed in 
 " The Serious Side of a Worldly Man," and " The Lighter Side of a 
 Serious Woman."
 
 14 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 CAMEO BOOK-STAMPS. 
 
 By CYRIL DAVENPORT, F.S.A., 
 
 SUPERINTENDENT OF BOOKBINDING IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 
 
 With about 150 Illustrations from Original Drawings by the Author. 
 
 The First Edition will be limited to 500 Copies only. In One Volume. 
 
 Super-Royal 8vo. 2 is. net. 
 
 Bookbinding stamps of different kinds have already been much 
 written about, especially heraldic ones, but cameo stamps, although 
 they have now and then been mentioned, have up to the present 
 received no special recognition. They are in low relief, like medals, 
 and are generally left ungilded and uncoloured. 
 
 These stamps the larger and more important of which are illus- 
 trated in this book form, in fact, a very important division of the 
 subject of decorative bookbinding, and, unlike most of the other kinds 
 of book decoration, they rarely can be satisfactorily photographed. 
 Mr. Davenport's drawings, however, are singularly accurate copies 
 of their originals, and will undoubtedly prove of the utmost value both 
 to book-collectors and dealers in books. 
 
 Some of the stamps shown are well known those English ones> 
 for instance, showing the Tudor Rose, and the coat-of-arms of Henry 
 VIII. ; but others are not so common. The English stamps of St. 
 George and of St. Michael are very fine indeed. The beautiful 
 French stamps of the vision of the Emperor Augustus, and the very 
 interesting Italian stamps of Horatius Codes and of Marcus Curtius, 
 will doubtless come as a revelation to many, and so with the 
 " Canevari " stamp of Apollo, although it is better known to 
 connoisseurs. 
 
 The large series of German stamps, mostly on pigskin, is of great 
 importance ; there are several excellent portraits of Luther and of 
 Melanchthon, and quaint stamps of Lot and his daughters, Judith 
 and Holofernes, Jonah and the Whale, and many delicately cut 
 stamps of incidents in the life of Christ and of the Virgin Mary. 
 
 All these stamps, of which there are about 150, are beautifully and 
 truthfully copied from the originals, and with each is a short descrip- 
 tion. At the end is a full and most useful index. Every inscrip- 
 tion, whether in Greek, Latin, or German, is translated, and every 
 initial noted and indexed. 
 
 The book will be invaluable to every librarian in fact, necessary 
 and it will add much to the interest of every book, whether in 
 morocco, calf, or pigskin, that bears upon it one of the stamps 
 illustrated.
 
 Mr. Edward A mold's A utumn A nnouncements. 1 5 
 
 A LITTLE HISTORY OF MUSIC. 
 
 By ANNETTE HULLAH. 
 
 With Numerous Illustrations. One Volume. Medium 8vo. 55. 
 
 This is a history of music written in a simple way for young 
 people. After a chapter on aboriginal songs and dance-tunes, and 
 another on the music of ancient nations, the Romans lead us into 
 early Britain, and so to the first Christian chants. Then we have 
 mediaeval monks and scholars arranging scales. Minstrels and 
 troubadours, with the stories of their time, bring us to the Eliza- 
 bethian age of masque and madrigal. How Florentine genius 
 developed these into the first operas and oratorios completes the 
 next century. Then we come to a period of fine players and fine 
 instruments, of Corelli and Tartini, of Amati and Stradivarius, of 
 harpsichordists like Scarlatti, and of German organists long since 
 eclipsed by the light of Bach. What he, and the other great com- 
 posers since his day, did for music fills up the rest of the chapters 
 and takes the record down to our own time. There are many 
 legends and anecdotes in the book, and illustrations of quaint 
 musical instruments of old days. 
 
 THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME 
 RULE. 
 
 By ERSKINE CHILDERS, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE," "THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS," ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Demy 8vo. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 A study of the Irish question, mainly from the Imperial standpoint. 
 First sketching the history of Ireland in close conjunction with that 
 of the lost American Colonies and the present self-governing 
 Dominions, the author shows that the same forms of misgovern- 
 ment arising from similar conditions have always led to the same 
 mischievous results, and that their only remedy, when applied in 
 time, has been Home Rule. He then reviews the present state of 
 Ireland, describing the extraordinary anomalies of the semi-colonial 
 government. Full attention is given also to the brighter side of 
 Irish life. But the author points out the deep marks of arrested 
 development, and the need for self-reliance and self-development 
 under a responsible Irish Government. 
 
 With regard to the form Home Rule should take, the author 
 devotes special attention to the vital questions of finance and Irish 
 representation at Westminster, as well as to guarantees for an Ulster 
 minority, executive power, police, judges, and numerous other points 
 of secondary importance. 
 
 The aim is to supply not only a reasoned defence of Home Rule, 
 but a practical up-to-date guide to the legislative settlement of the 
 question.
 
 i6 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 PROS AND CONS OF POLITICAL 
 PROBLEMS, 
 
 By Sir J. D. REES, K.C.I.E. 
 One Volume. 75. 6d. net. 
 
 In this book Sir J. D. Rees, K.C.I.E., ex.-M.P., surveys the more 
 important political problems at present before the nation from the 
 points of view of both great parties in the State. The following 
 subjects are dealt with : Imperial Organization, Defence, Foreign 
 Policy, Indian and Colonial Problems, Trade Relations and Tariff 
 Reform, Suffrage, Home Rule, Education, Disestablishment, Finance, 
 Socialism, Labour Questions, Land Reform, and the Constitutional 
 Problems at present before the country. To each great question a 
 chapter is devoted which gives the reader a concise survey of the 
 points at issue and a summary of the position at the present day, 
 and to every chapter are appended the arguments for and against : 
 in the hope that the reader in a few pages may find a guide to the 
 reasons upon which political parties base their case. The utility of 
 the work to the student and politician will be enhanced by the 
 bibliographical notes at the end of each chapter, which indicate the 
 scope of the works recommended, so that the reader may be able to 
 follow up his study of any political question. The information has 
 been compressed into a volume of handy size so as to be of use 
 to speakers and politicians. It is not, however, merely a work of 
 reference although an excellent index and the sub-division of the 
 chapters make reference easy but is intended to be read. 
 
 ECONOMICS FOR BEGINNERS. 
 
 By GEORGE W. GOUGH, M.A., 
 
 SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF BAI.I.IOL COLLEGE. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 The need of a short textbook of economics which teachers can 
 place in the hands of pupils who are starting the subject with a view 
 to preparing for the more elementary parts of the higher examina- 
 tions in it, is well known, and Mr. Cough's little volume is an 
 attempt to meet it. The core of this vast subject, if the expression
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 17 
 
 may be used, is fully and simply treated in accordance with authori- 
 tative opinion. Hence the beginner who means to continue his 
 studies will be put in a position to read one or more of the larger 
 manuals with advantage. As appendices there will be given a guide 
 to further reading, a selection of typical questions for the answers 
 to which the text of the book will be found to furnish materials and 
 hints and a short selection of statistics illustrating modern economic 
 conditions in the United Kingdom. It is, further, the author's hope 
 that the book will be useful to older students interested in social 
 problems, and that they will find in it the elements of the economic 
 principles bearing on their solution. 
 
 THE GREAT PLATEAU OF 
 NORTHERN RHODESIA. 
 
 By CULLEN GOULDSBURY AND HERBERT SHEANE, 
 
 OF THE BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY'S SERVICE. 
 
 With Preface by Sir ALFRED SHARPE, K.C.M.G., C.B. 
 
 With 40 pages of Illustrations and a Map. One Volume. 
 Demy 8vo. i6s. net. 
 
 This book has been written about the Tanganyika Plateau of 
 Northern Rhodesia, which though some fifty thousand square 
 miles in extent is still practically unknown, since it has not yet been 
 penetrated, or its resources tapped by the Cape to Cairo Railway. 
 
 Apart from its abundant natural resources, the excellent climate 
 of the Plateau and its high altitude (from 4,000 to 6,000 feet) render 
 it as healthy and suitable for white colonization as the far-famed 
 Highlands of British East Africa. 
 
 The book is divided into two parts, European and Ethnographic. 
 The Ethnographic Section is dealt with by Mr. Sheane, who, during 
 the past ten years, has made a special study of language and native 
 customs upon the Tanganyika Plateau. 
 
 The needs of prospective settlers and ranchers are fully discussed, 
 and information for sportsmen and travellers is supplied in two 
 chapters dealing with elephant-hunting and the species and habits 
 of game, big and small, to be found upon the Plateau. 
 
 Lastly, the Native chapters should prove of value, not only to 
 anthropologists, but also to that increasing body of readers who are 
 interested in the problems of native life and of native law and 
 custom in Central Africa.
 
 1 8 Mr. Edward A mold's A utumn A nnouncements. 
 
 HINTS TO SPEAKERS AND 
 PLAYERS. 
 
 By ROSINA FILIPPI. 
 One Volume. Crown 8vo. 33. 6d. net. 
 
 Miss Rosina Filippi is an actress well known to, and deservedly 
 popular with, the playgoing public of Great Britain. The excellent 
 work she has done in teaching the younger members of her pro- 
 fession has evoked the admiration of her colleagues who recognize 
 her claims to a front place on the English stage which she has long 
 adorned. She has, indeed, won a deservedly high reputation as a 
 teacher of dramatic art, and many are the students who have profited 
 by her instruction and owe their success to her ripe experience. 
 " Hints to Speakers and Players " is, as its name implies, a guide 
 or handbook to all who desire to attain proficiency in the art of 
 speaking or acting. In this work the author offers invaluable advice 
 upon such subjects as Elocution, Diction, Gesticulation, Ranting, 
 etc., not only to would-be actors, but also to Members of Parliament, 
 orators, clergymen, and all who may be called upon to deliver 
 speeches on the political platform, in the pulpit, or at the dinner- 
 table. Her facile pen ranges over the wide field of her experience 
 and deals in a light but informing fashion with a hundred matters 
 that must inevitably prove interesting to all who are compelled to 
 raise their voices in public. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE 
 OF FATHER TYRRELL. 
 
 By MAUD PETRE. 
 In Two Volumes. Demy 8vo., cloth. 2 is. net. 
 
 The first volume, which is autobiographical, will cover the period 
 from George Tyrrell's birth in 1861 to the year 1885, including an 
 account of his family, his childhood, schooldays, and youth in 
 Dublin ; his conversion from Agnosticism, through a phase of High 
 Church Protestantism to Catholicism ; his experiences in Cyprus 
 and Malta, where he lived as a probationer before entering the 
 Society of Jesus ; his early life as a Jesuit, with his novitiate and 
 first studies in scholastic philosophy and Thomism. This autobiog- 
 raphy, written in 1901, ends just before the death of his mother, 
 and was not carried any farther. It is edited with notes and 
 supplements to each chapter by M. D. Petre. 
 
 The second volume, which takes up the story where the first ends,
 
 Mr, Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 19 
 
 deals chiefly with the storm and stress period of his later years. 
 Large use is made of his own notes, and of his letters, of which a 
 great number have been lent by correspondents of all shades 
 of thought. Various documents of importance figure in this later 
 volume, in which the editor aims at making the history as complete 
 and objective as possible. Incidentally some account is given of the 
 general movement of thought, which has been loosely described as 
 " modernism," but the chief aim of the writer will be to describe the 
 part which Father Tyrrell himself played in this movement, and the 
 successive stages of his mental development as he brought his 
 scholastic training to bear on the modern problems that confronted 
 him. The work ends with his death on July 15, 1909, and the 
 events immediately subsequent to his death. The date of publica- 
 tion it uncertain, but will be announced as soon as possible. 
 
 THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. 
 
 Bssags on 3uoaism ant) Cbristian riQfns. 
 
 By GRADUATES OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 Edited by Dr. F. J. FOAKES-JACKSON. 
 With an Introduction by the Very Rev. W. R. INGE, D.D., 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S. 
 
 One Volume. Demy Svo. los. 6d. net. 
 
 Several volumes of Theological Essays have appeared from the 
 two ancient Universities, but none hitherto by members of a single 
 college. Jesus College, Cambridge, has, however, had exceptional 
 opportunities for encouraging the study of Divinity, owing to the 
 fact that of recent years it has numbered two Lady Margaret Pro- 
 fessors among the fellows, and has been generously endowed by the 
 late Lord Justice Kay, who founded scholarships for post-graduate 
 study in Theology. 
 
 The object of these essays is to trace the origin of Christianity from 
 Judaism, and its development till the final parting of the two religions. 
 With the exception of the Introduction and Essays I. and III., all 
 the writers have taken their degrees quite recently, and though they 
 have obtained high honours at the University, the volume must be 
 judged as a young men's book. As such it may prove the more 
 interesting as illustrating the ideas of some of our younger theo- 
 logians. The essays are not the product of any school, but represent 
 all shades of thought in the Church of England, whilst one is written 
 by a Nonconformist, and another by a Jewish scholar. All the 
 essayists have, however, been the pupils of the editor, and most 
 have come under the influence of the Dean of St. Paul's.
 
 2O Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 HOW TO DEAL WITH MEN. 
 
 By the Rev. PETER GREEN, M.A., 
 
 RECTOR or ST. PHILIP'S, SALFORD, AND CANON OP MANCHESTER. 
 AUTHOR OF "How TO DEAL WITH LADS," ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. as. 6d. net. 
 
 Beginning with chapters on the nature of work among men, and 
 the special needs of the present time, and on the type of man 
 required for success in this kind of work, the author goes on to 
 treat in detail such subjects as the Men's Bible-Class ; the various 
 methods for promoting its success ; the different kinds of work 
 which should spring out of the work of the class ; and some of the 
 commoner dangers to be watched and guarded against. Following 
 the chapters on the Bible-Class and its developments, come chapters 
 on social and recreative work, such as that of the Men's Club and 
 the minor clubs in connection with it, temperance benefit societies, 
 and social and parochial work for men. The second part of the 
 book is devoted to a detailed treatment of personal work with 
 individual men. Methods with men troubled with religious doubt, 
 or with other intellectual difficulties, and methods of dealing with 
 various moral problems, are carefully and fully discussed. 
 
 THE FAITH OF AN AVERAGE MAN. 
 
 By the Rev. CHARLES H. S. MATTHEWS, M.A., 
 
 AUTHOR OK " A PARSON IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH," ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 The author is profoundly convinced that on the one hand the 
 endless restlessness of modern life is a witness to man's need of a 
 vital faith, and on the other that the continued vitality of the historic 
 Church of England is in itself a proof of her power to meet this 
 fundamental need of men. The position he occupies, and would in 
 this book commend to others, may best be described as a kind of 
 progressive Catholicism, a true via media between an exclusive 
 Protestantism on the one hand, which seems to him to be founded 
 on a view of the Bible no longer tenable, and an equally exclusive 
 Catholicism on the other, which in its turn seems to be founded on 
 a no less untenable view of the Church. It is the author's hope 
 that his appeal may be read, not only by laymen, but also by the 
 younger clergy.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 21 
 
 THE CHURCH AND MODERN 
 PROBLEMS. 
 
 By the Rev. C. F. GARBETT, M.A., 
 
 VICAR OF PORTSEA. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 An interesting volume, composed of addresses mainly delivered 
 in the course of the author's ordinary parochial work during the last 
 two years. They are all united by the attempt to state the attitude 
 of the Church to some of the many modern problems of religious 
 thought and action. Among these are Modernism, Rationalism, 
 Agnosticism, the Higher Criticism, Inspiration, the Reunion of 
 Christendom, Divorce, Temperance Reform, and Socialism. The 
 attitude of the Church to all these tremendous intellectual, moral, 
 and social problems is briefly argued and discussed with tact and 
 ability. 
 
 THE MIND OF ST. PAUL: 
 
 Us Illustrated bs bis Second Epistle to tbe Corintbians, 
 
 By Canon H. L. GOUDGE, D.D. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF ELY THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 A GOODLY FELLOWSHIP 
 Ubougbts in Iflerse ano prose from maup Sources. 
 
 Collected by ROSE E. SELFE. 
 
 With a Preface by 
 His Grace the ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 One Volume. Small Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 This small religious anthology has been compiled in the hope 
 that the various suggestions and counsels, the voices of praise and 
 aspiration, and the poets' visions of the past, present, and future may 
 come through the windows of the soul, which are open to receive
 
 22 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 them with comfort, encouragement, and inspiration. The passages 
 are grouped under the following headings : Religion in Childhood, 
 Our Human Life, Sorrow and Suffering, On Prayer, Aspiration 
 and Communion, The Incarnate Christ, Christian Seasons, Old Age, 
 Death and After. But there are no hard and fast divisions, and many 
 of the extracts might be appropriately classed under two or more 
 of these headings. More than seventy authors have been laid 
 under contribution, including some as widely separated in time as 
 Boethius, Thomas Traherne, William Law, Christina Rossetti, the 
 present Dean of St. Paul's (Dr. W. R. Inge), and Mr. G. K. 
 Chesterton. 
 
 New and Cheaper Edition. 
 
 SCOTTISH GARDENS. 
 
 By the Right Hon. Sir HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart. 
 
 With 32 Coloiwed Plates from Pastel Drawings especially 
 done for this work by 
 
 Miss M. G. W. WILSON, 
 
 MEMBER OF THE PASTEL SOCIETY AND OF THE SCOTTISH SOCIETY OF ARTISTS. 
 
 New Edition. Medium 8vo. 75. 6d. net. 
 
 It was not originally intended that this charming work, of which 
 both the Edition de Luxe and the ordinary Edition were sold out 
 two months after publication, should be reprinted. So persistent, 
 however, have been the inquiries for it that it has been decided to 
 re-issue it in a cheaper edition, but with all the original plates. The 
 success of the book in the first instance may be attributed both to 
 the attractiveness of the subject and to the harmonious combination 
 of artistic and literary skill which characterized it, and these features 
 will in no sense be modified in the new edition. 
 
 A \New Edition Revised. 
 
 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 
 
 By the late Very Rev. S REYNOLDS HOLE, 
 
 DEAN OF ROCHESTER. 
 
 With Coloured Plates. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 
 This edition contains the Dean's latest corrections of his famous 
 book, a new chapter on " Progress " up to the present time by 
 Dr. Alfred Williams, Member of Committee of the National Rose 
 Society, and a full and up-to-date list of roses compiled and classified 
 by the same competent hand.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 23 
 
 NEW FICTION. 
 TANTE. 
 
 By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK 
 (Mrs. Basil de Selincourt), 
 
 AUTHOR OF "FRANKLIN KANE," " VALEKIE UPTON," ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 A deeply interesting book, which, it is believed, will be considered 
 by far the most powerful work the author has accomplished. It is 
 a long story, but the interest never flags, and the plot culminates in 
 an exceedingly dramatic way. 
 
 THE BRACKNELS. 
 
 By FORREST REID. 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 This is an interesting novel describing the fortunes of an Irish 
 family, into the midst of which comes Mr. Rusk, a young English 
 tutor. Each member of the family is well and distinctly portrayed, 
 and there is an under-current of mysticism of a distinctly uncanny 
 tendency. Denis, a boy of sixteen, the pupil of Mr. Rusk, is a 
 particularly charming figure, who contrasts sharply with some of the 
 other members of the Bracknel family. 
 
 A ROMANCE OF THE SIMPLE. 
 
 By MARY J. H. SKRINE. 
 
 AUTHOR OF " A STEPSON OF THE SOIL." 
 
 6s. 
 
 MORE GHOST STORIES. 
 
 By Dr. M. R. JAMES, 
 
 PROVOST OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 AUTHOR OF " GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY," ETC. 
 
 Medium Svo. 6s.
 
 24 Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 
 
 THE MOTTO OF MRS. McLANE. 
 
 Ube Storp of an Bmerican jfarm. 
 
 By SHIRLEY CARSON. 
 One Volume. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 
 A very clever piece of character drawing ; the scene is laid in 
 a Western American farm, where the McLane family have been 
 settled for a considerable number of years. Life on the farm at 
 various seasons is painted in vivid and attractive colours, but the 
 feature of the story is the shrewd homely wit of Mrs. McLane and 
 her neighbours. Their conversations remind one of the success of 
 " Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch," and are so clever and 
 spontaneous that they cannot fail to be thoroughly enjoyed by all 
 readers. 
 
 LOVE IN BLACK. 
 
 By Sir H. HESKETH BELL, K.C.M.G., 
 
 GOVERNOR OF NORTHERN NIGERIA. 
 
 One Volume. Medium 8vo. 6s. 
 
 This volume contains a number of sketches of native life in West 
 Africa, in the garb of fiction. No one has had better opportunities 
 than the author of penetrating the veil of mystery and fetish that 
 enshrouds the inner life of the native, and no one has drawn their 
 characters with a more sympathetic and romantic hand. The titles 
 of the sketches give some idea of the contents of the volume. Among 
 them are " The Fetish Mountain of Krobo," " The Yam Custom,' 
 ' The Tale of a Tail-Girl," " His Highness Prince Kwakoo," " On 
 Her Majesty's Service," " A Woman of Ashanti." 
 
 STEAM TURBINE DESIGN: 
 Witb Especial IReference to tbe IReaction 
 
 By JOHN MORROW, M.Sc., D.Eng., 
 
 LECTURER IN ENGINEERING, ARMSTRONG COLLEGE, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE. 
 
 Demy Svo. Fully illustrated with 150 Diagrams and 9 Folding Plates. 
 
 Since the days of Watt no greater revolution has taken place in 
 steam machinery than the advent of the turbine. In the face of the 
 greatest difficulties it was introduced by the Hon. Sir Charles A. 
 Parsons both for marine and electrical work, and with the success of 
 the s.s. Lusitania and Mauretania the public for the first time realized 
 that it had come to stay. Many books, both of description and 
 theory, have been written on the steam turbine, yet up to the 
 present few have been devoted definitely to its design. In the 
 present volume Dr. Morrow gives a clear explanation of the prin- 
 ciples and practice of turbine design and construction as followed 
 out in the drawing-office and engineering workshop. 
 
 LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET. W.
 
 JA/ 
 
 A- 
 
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