A BOOK OF LIGHT ON THE IRISH DI7D BY ANDREW REID. THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES : * 10 IRELAND: A BOOK OF LIGHT ON THE IRISH PROBLEM. CONTRIBUTED IN UNION BY A NUMBER OF LEADING IRISHMEN AND ENGLISHMEN. EDITOR OF " WHY I AM A LIBERAL." LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 1886. 77//S WORK BOOK OF LIGHT ON THE IRISH PROBLEM QC IS HUMBLY DEDICATED TO THE 2 2 RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. WITH REVERENCE AND AFFECTION IN THE HOPE THAT AT THIS PERIOD OF NATIONAL DARKNESS uj IT MAY GIVE SOME LIGHT 391)765 PREFACE. T T is intended that this book shall be made a Representa- tive Work on the Irish Problem. A number of eminent Englishmen, such as Professor FREEMAN, Sir C. GAVAN DUFFY, Professor SIGERSON, will contribute articles to a future and more complete edition of the Work, with other well-known leaders of mind in this country and the United States. It is believed that the volume throws some strong light upon the position which the Liberal Party must occupy, and that swiftly, if it is to preserve its historical reputation, be worthy of its grand leader, and victorious in the great struggle before it. Any other position will be lower down, less secure, and less commanding. The site here indicated by wise and far-seeing men is one as lofty as it is impreg- nable. If you have not the courage to occupy that situa- tion, fortified as it is by Great Principles and by Liberty herself, how can you have the courage to take up a position out in the open, which will give you no natural advantages and expose you to the withering fire of a swarm of foes ? In this work, of course, no contributor must be held answerable for the opinions of any other, though it will be seen there is complete union of sentiment among them. vi PREFACE. The article from " Leaves from a Prison Diary," by Mr. MICHAEL DAVITT who I am sure will be of the greatest service to his country in its new era of national life is printed here at his kind suggestion, and by the courteous permission of Mr. CHAPMAN (Messrs. Chapman, Hall & Co., Limited). THE EDITOR. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION ix ARTHUR ARNOLD i HON. REGINALD B. BRETT 19 MARQUIS OF LORNE . .22 PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS, M.P. ... - 23 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D. 42 ANNA BATESON 51 CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P 59 REV. R. ACLAND ARMSTRONG 64 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 69 A. I. TILLYARD, M.A. CAMB 74 J. O'CONNOR POWER 77 REV. T. J. LAWRENCE 88 T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P 96 DR. MATTHEW ROBERTSON 114 LORD MAYOR OF DUBLIN (Rt Hon. T. D. SULLIVAN, M.P.) 121 MICHAEL DAVITT 123 A SKETCH OF IRISH HISTORY. By JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY, M.P 129 UNITED STATES CONSTITUTIONS. By OAKEY HALL . . 150 THE CONSTITUTION OF SWITZERLAND. By Dr. WILLIAM BURCKHARDT 156 THE DUAL SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT 01 HUNGARY AND AUSTRIA. By Dr. F. L. WEINMANS 161 STATISTICAL TABLES. Prepared by W. LEIGH BERNARD . 177 INTRODUCTION. IS the Empire in danger ? What Empire ? The British ? There is an Empire against which, if the British people, great as they are, take up arms, they take up arms against a sea of troubles which will overwhelm them THE EMPIRE OF LIBERTY, founded by ages of sacrifice, fortified and consolidated and made invulnerable by the blood of their fathers, the costly experience of centuries, and the long struggles of nations. This is not in danger ; but the British Empire, magnificent and powerful as she is, would be, were she mad enough to wage war against it. They laugh (you know them) : " Ah, your Empire of Liberty is all sentiment; it has no army and navy, no geographical status, no money. Ah ! ah ! We fear it not." Those others who have learnt the history of the world a little better than to laugh: "We do not wish to take up arms against this Empire of Liberty. We would give to Ireland the same freedom as we give to ourselves. She lias the same Parliament, the same franchise as ourselves. It is not the question of liberty, but the safety of our Empire. We would not give Ireland a Parliament of her own, for it would jeopardize the Empire." It is then a question of liberty. Your ideas of the safety of your Empire are to be the limits of the freedom of Ireland. The British Empire can only be safe by jeopardiz- ing the liberty of Ireland, or the liberty of Ireland can only be safe by jeopardizing the security of the Empire. Is this not a profoundly melancholy situation ? Ireland can only be happy by injuring the rights of the Empire : the Empire can only be happy by injuring the rights of Ireland. What a sad and terrible strait for two x INTRODUCTION. nations to be in ! The noble British Empire the mother of liberty and of nations is afraid to have near her a country possessing free institutions. Her colonies (which are thousands of leagues away) may have them. She cannot help France (who is a nearer neighbour than Ireland) having a Republic ; but Ireland, the only neighbour within her power, to her she denies freedom. Is that not so ? " It is so," you say. " But it is not our fault, it is the fault of Ireland. They are a discontented people. Nothing will satisfy them." " Nothing will satisfy them ! " Why, you have just con- fessed that the something they want you cannot give them, and after refusing to give it you say, " Nothing will satisfy them." Either the Government makes the people, or the people makes the Government. The Government of- Ireland is your Government. Are the people discontented ? you have made them discontented. Are they rebels ? you have made them rebels. Oppression manufactures rebels. The liberty of one nation is never in conflict with the liberty of another nation. The freedom of the individual is never in conflict with the freedom of society. The rights of the one are never in hostility with the rights of the other. If so, it is not liberty ; if so, they are not rights. There is a territory which belongs to the individual ; there is another which belongs to society. There is one which belongs to the nation; there is another which belongs to the Empire. There is one which belongs to the Empire ; there is another, wider still, which belongs to the world, to the human race, to universal society. There is a natural and scientific frontier to each of these territories, and no individual, or people, or empire, has the right to invade them. People talk of the British Empire, but that is also subject to the universal empire of man ; and both are again subject to the rights of the infant mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. Ireland has a national territory of liberty belonging to her which is her right. It belongs to her just the same as yours belongs to you. Do you want to defend your Empire to make her secure? You must do so within the limits of your own territory of liberty. You say : " But the interests of our Empire are greater than the interests of Ireland. Look INTRODUCTION. xi at our vast population: the people of Ireland are nothing in comparison. Is Ireland to jeopardize the security of such a great people ? " If you wish to jeopardize your Empire oppress. You will have a swarm of enemies. If you wish to protect the interests of your people, respect the interests and liberties of Ireland, and you will lift her up to respect the interests and liberties of England. You say, " We are afraid of Ireland." Of course you are. You may well be afraid. Oppression will clothe the child with thunder which will shake even empires. Liberty is for the protection of the weak against the strong of Ireland against you. It does not matter how mighty you are. Liberty is mightier, and will put into the hand of Ireland the power and opportunity which will compel you to be just. There is no authority given by Heaven or among men which endows one nation with the permanent function to govern another. Good government always leads to liberty and free institutions. If any nation be incapable of these, the function of good government is to make them capable. The measure of the right of one community over another is the measure of capacity it is giving it, earnestly and inces- santly, to rule itself. Is Ireland capable of self-government ? then give it to her. Is Ireland not capable ? what more damning proof could you have that the government by England is not a good government. I wish my countrymen to see how monstrous and dan- gerous it would be were we to allow the principle that the notions of safety, or even of self-preservation, which Russia or any other empire may hold, would justify her in swallow- ing up the liberties of other peoples. Suppose we were a small and weak nation, and France were to say, " I am afraid of England ; I am a great republic ; I must protect myself; I will occupy England by my army ; I will smother her liberties ; I will demolish her Parliament," would you not feel as Ireland does ? And what have you to say against France or Russia, or any empire which would do such things, if you do them yourselves ? I feel the shame of having to plead with my own countrymen, who are supposed to know and love liberty more than any other nation on the earth. xii INTRODUCTION. But an eminent judge has tried, convicted and sentenced, without jury, the whole people of Ireland to coercion, for- getting they are less criminals than ourselves : Local in- stitutions will lead in Ireland to a Parliament, and a Parlia- ment will lead to the dismemberment of the Empire ; therefore, coercion. I would sentence to penal servitude for life this learned and heartless logic : Coercion will lead to rebellion, rebellion will lead to revo- lution, revolution will lead to the dismemberment of the Empire ; therefore not coercion. If both lead to the same goal, would it not be wiser to take the path of liberty ; and should it fail us, we have the con- sciousness within our own hearts we have trod the path of duty ? If we must reap the whirlwind, let us feel we have not sown the whirlwind. Having held the scale of justice up before the eyes of the civilized world, and weighed out liberty to Ireland with no false weights having made the scale rather dip well down on the side of Ireland we then, if need be, can, like the Gaul, throw in the sword of the Empire, and say : " We have given you more than you ask ; the rest we must defend with our arms." There is one thing of which I am profoundly convinced : we must not give to Ireland a mere village constitution. Even statesmen talk of " councils " and " local institutions," as if these would touch the situation. It is the national sentiment of the Irish people you have to satisfy, and you can only satisfy it, by a National Parliament. You must absorb the restless genius of the Irish people by giving them a constitution which will attract that restless genius. The first condition which is that you must limit an Irish Parlia- ment to the internal affairs of Ireland imposes the second condition, that you must keep free for it as wide and im- portant a territory of government as you can. The larger range, the more dignity, the more power you give to it, the less will she fret at those limits which you must impose upon that Parliament, and the more likely is she to have in it an assembly of calm, just, and able men, friendly to us and use- ful to Ireland, ANDREW REID. IRELAND: A BOOK OF LIGHT ON THE IRISH PROBLEM. ARTHUR ARNOLD, A 1 /"HY do we consider the Irish claim to be pressing, to be something to which we find no sufficient answer in the writings of the Times, of the Duke of Argyll, of Sir James Stephen ? Why is it that we cannot say with Lord Cowper, "We need not even argue the case?" Why may we not follow that eminent jurist and judge, who can frame an indictment against a whole people in the columns of the Times, and so brush aside the claim for self-government with an assumption that it would be nothing but the triumph of plunder, of violence, of lawlessness? How easy, how almost enviable it seems, to be able to adopt such views ! I will at once produce the key to this frame of mind and will ask if it fits the conscience of the British people. Those whom it fits will stand on one side ; let those whose minds it will not unlock stand upon the other side. Is Ireland a part of the British nation? As many as are of that opinion say " Aye ; " the contrary, " No." I think the Noes have it. The Noes have it. From what a mass B 2 IRELAND. of difficulty should we be relieved, if we, find those still more concerned, could adopt Sir James Stephen's view. It is very plain. He challenges us with this, which he dignifies by the title of "argument" " Whatever may be really for the good of Ireland, the British Parliament can and ought to do ; but it should do it itself, and on its own responsibility- A part of the nation has, or thinks it has, a grievance." I feel bound to repudiate, as offensive to justice and to history, the doctrine that the Irish are part of the British nation. The Scotch, who by their partnership with the English have become the richest people that ever occupied so poor a country, have no cause to frown at the imputation of English nationality. But I am quite sure Mr. Goschen would never have dared to recommend his claims in Edin- burgh by asserting that " after all," the Scotch are a part of the English nation. What is a nation ? A body of people in number and strength sufficient to be recognised by other nations, living within well-known boundaries, and possessing sufficient communion of thought and purpose to be, as to the majority, moved by common desires natural to their condition. Ireland is a nation, so distinct that we cannot refuse to consider a claim presented by 85 to 1 6 of her duly elected representatives, and supported by at least 120,000 Irish voters in Great Britain, who, upon any system of pro- portional representation in the United Kingdom as a whole, would have been added to the electors voting in support of Irish Nationalism. Therefore I feel bound to reject Lord Cowper's view, and to consent to argue the case. If I held the view that Ireland is part of the British nation, I should imitate the brevity of Lord Cowper rather than the prolixity of Justice Stephen. There is nothing to argue if the Irish claim to self-government differs in no way from a similar claim made by the members for Kent or for Yorkshire. Then of course we should meet it with a flat negative and ARTHUR ARNOLD. 3 proceed with a perfectly free conscience to any necessary measures of coercion. Let us be honest. Beyond all this offensive talk to Irishmen about the British nation and the British Parlia- ment, in which their very existence is at least nominally ignored, are not we Englishmen well aware that if by four- fifths of the members for Scotland a claim like that of Ireland were presented, and a case were made out for our consideration, by which the overloaded Parliament of the United Kingdom might be relieved of all bills and ques- tions relating to those affairs which are exclusively Scottish in their interest, we should be unanimous in denouncing any one who declared that " we need not even argue the case ?" But in the matter of Ireland, statesmen and jurists are not ashamed to assume that in the most bloodless election Ireland has probably ever seen, four-fifths of her representa- tives are elected to pursue a policy of plunder with the aids of outrage and assassination. A lawyer may frame, a free people cannot endorse such an accusation. Representative institutions are but a snare and a mockery, the august mother of free Parliaments is a cheat and a humbug, if, when a claim is thus presented, we are not bound by all the most sacred obligations of pride, of honour, and of duty, to argue and to examine the case. Admitting, then, that Ireland is a nation, with powerful sentiments and even with interests which it has never been proposed to make subject to identical law, I proceed in the effort to arrive at a common understanding by putting the inquiry, What are the limits which the conscience of the British people places upon this claim ? Are there matters upon which they will cease from argument, and will apply their superior might? There may be a Scottish dukes' paradise and an English judges' paradise, in which the dwellers assume that the British people will exercise force B 2 4 IRELAND. in Ireland with denial of all discussion. That is a very dangerous dwelling. It is our most urgent duty to make plain to the Irish people those points of positive resistance. If we refuse to argue the case, and proceed, as would be necessary, to govern Ireland with as little regard to repre- sentative institutions as though she had none, then might not the question arise, whether we should not offer to foreign countries a possible case for intervention? The people's conscience would sanction nay more, it would applaud the armed investment of Ireland by Great Britain against any foreign invader. But if under existing circum- stances we refused to argue the claim of Ireland, should we not be giving a dangerous incitement to foreign intervention ? We are bound to protect ourselves against any foreign occupation of Ireland. Such a proceeding would be justi- fiable as a measure of self-preservation. The British have never been afraid of war. I agree entirely with Mr. Mill, that " it is not the greatest evil a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things : the degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse." Let it be understood, then, that we will fight for the unity of the Empire. The foreign relations of Ireland must be ours also. This is the logic of a law older and more obligatory than that of nations the law of geographical conditions and circumstances. Lord Russell once said : " I should have been very glad if the leaders of popular opinion in Ireland had so modified and mollified their demand for Home Rule as to make it con- sistent with the unity of the Empire." I quote those words to show that Mr. Gladstone's limitation upon the demand lor Home Rule is the same as that of his predecessor in the leadership of the Liberal party. But this is simply the refusal of absolute separation. It means that Ireland cannot be permitted to form a separate sovereignty. It ARTHUR ARNOLD. 5 matters little, but such a divorce has never to my know- ledge been claimed by any responsible leader of the Irish people. Whenever this is said of Mr. Parnell, reference is always made to words he is alleged to have used somewhere in the United States, expressing his wish to destroy the " last link " of connection between Great Britain and Ireland. I think I have heard him disavow those words in the House of Commons. It is not, however, of much consequence what he meant, seeing that he has been careful not to repeat them. Obviously these words do not of necessity imply more than those he has used in Ireland, in claiming a domestic legislature, dealing with matters exclusively of Irish interest. " The unity of the Empire, and all the authority of Parlia- ment necessary for the conservation of that unity," are, however, quite compatible with giving to Ireland institutions such as those which obtain in self-governing colonies of the British Empire. I do not see that we are called upon to open the door to arguments quite so wide in their scope. Mr. Justin McCarthy is of all the Irish party the most highly trained in statecraft. He has nothing of the ascendancy or the dogged will of Mr. Parnell. One of the difficulties of the time lies in the fact that Mr. Parnell has never been a student of politics. In days to come he may be regarded as a sort of Irish Washington. But his contemporaries know that he is by nature somewhat of a dreamy politician, whom circumstances, including his Irish-American parentage and observation, have forced into a position which has been to no one a greater surprise than to himself. Mr. Parnell, however, has won his position by the power which is all his own, and is a very uncommon propeity of defying British opinion with a cold, silent, and most disdainful manner in the House of Commons. It was this character, never before displayed from year to year by any Irish 6 IRELAND. gentleman, which gained for Mr. Parnell the confidence of the disaffected Irish. " Here is a man," they said, " who, with perfect indifference to British feeling, without brag, or blarney, or bluster, has carried obstruction to lengths which have forced recognition from Parliament." It has been as plain to them as to us who have sat with him in the House of Commons, that with Liberal and Tory Governments alike Mr. Parnell has negotiated for the introduction or the passing of Bills upon the basis of his power in reference to other legislation. He is now possessed of an authority by which he can nullify at his pleasure the most useful and effective of the Rules of 1882. By securing the attendance of forty of his band he can on any and every night compel the Speaker to choose between remaining in the chair to hear Irish members discuss some " definite matter of urgent public importance," or applying the cloture, with perhaps doubtful authority. Whatever else may happen, it is not unlikely to be quickly demonstrated that the new Rules are inadequate to the needs of Parliament. For such work Mr. Parnell's methods are invaluable. He is not equally qualified to discuss the details of a political settlement. At all events, Mr. Justin McCarthy has perceived that it is useless to ask in the case of Ireland for the legislative powers of a self-governing colony, because Ireland is too near to Great Britain and too remote from any foreign country to render it possible for the larger island to admit of con- ditions in Ireland which might tend towards separation. We desire with ever-increasing ardour the maintenance of imperial union with the Colonies, but we should not fight for that matter against the persistent will of four-fifths of the members of the Colonial Legislatures. If Canada should desire to be merged with the United States, she is free to form a continental union. If Australia should wish to become the seat of a solitary empire or of a great ARTHUR ARNOLD. 7 republic, she too is free to follow an independent existence apart from that of the mother-country. But Ireland can never in this sense be independent. Just as New Guinea is bound by physical laws stronger than those of humanity to Australia, and will never act in total separation from the larger island ; just as Sicily is bound to Italy ; so is Ireland bound to Great Britain. Therefore we may, with Mr. Justin McCarthy, draw the words of limitation closer than those of Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone, and may proclaim the unity of the kingdom to be the indissoluble, the inef- faceable basis of all argument. We cannot recognise any menace to the title and sovereign authority of the United Kingdom, which are as dear to us, are as certainly objects for which any conceivable sacrifices of life and treasure would be made with heroism, with devotion, with success, as were such title and authority in the case of the people of the United States. I am quite prepared to admit the possibility that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland may become more truly united by a change of the constitution such as shall bring it into greater resem- blance to that of the United States of America. Then it is said: "Are you afraid of 86 members in a Parliament of 670? Is it possible you can admit this matter to argument, because you think to get rid of obstruction in the House of Commons? Are not the 584 able to secure the proper progress of business and that due respect for the will of the majority to which you seem disposed to pay attention in Ireland?" I own I am much surprised at this line of argument. Of course, Mr. Parnell and his band, together with 3,000,000 of unarmed, unor- ganized Irish people, are impotent against the legislative and military might of Great Britain. If the dynamite faction, which has been, I suspect, a much greater terror to Mr. Parnell than to the British public, were multiplied by hundreds, we 8 IRELAND. should listen less to the claims of Ireland while we per- fected a system for trapping and destroying these inhuman beasts of prey. No, we are not fearful of anything but to do wrong. We are afraid of being unjust. We can fight with the terrible resistless warfare of Ironsides ; but our conscience must go, clean and wholly, with us into civil battle. There are certain things we cannot do. We cannot give a full and free suffrage to Ireland in 1884, and then assert in 1886 that the overwhelming verdict of the Irish people is of no consequence. We cannot uphold repre- sentative institutions and stifle the voice of four-fifths of the representatives of one of the three nations. We must. listen to their claim as to one presented with an extraordinary and commanding body of assent. We cannot but frown shame on those who, without ears to hear, try to persuade us that this determination of the great majority of the Irish nation is nothing but an enterprise of plunder and lawlessness. It does not follow that we must admit their claim ; but we are bound in honour and duty to examine it with the deepest interest, attention, and respect. We hold that to refuse to argue such a case may be to incur the guilt of an incitement and an encouragement to lawlessness and crane. Now, what is the case ? Mr. Mill said : " Before admitting the authority of any persons, as organs of the will of the people, to dispose of the whole political existence of a country, I ask to see whether their credentials are from the whole or only from a part." First, then, we have, including, as we are bound, the unopposed elections, the verdict of a clear majority of the electors of Ireland. We have the evidence of 85 to 16 elected members. We have the complaint of the minority in nearly all parts of the country of the overwhelming influence of the Nationalist party. The loud claim of the minority forms an extremely ARTHUR ARNOLD. 9 important element in our rejection of any scheme of separa- tion. The demand for home government is not universal, though it is immensely preponderant. We have in these circumstances to consider what is our duty, what is the interest of the Irish people and our own interest, in the matter ? All are agreed that we must for common purposes maintain unity in the supreme government of the United Kingdom. We should no doubt obtain from Irish members valuable aid in reducing the cost of imperial government. The Crown lands in Ireland are not worth more than ^300 a year; from quit-rents reserved in ancient grants the Crown is entitled to receive about ^40,000 a year from Ireland ; and that is the whole of the Crown property in Ireland. I repudiate as absurd, for Irishmen as for Englishmen, the suggestion that they should make any payment to imperial revenues without representation in the Imperial Parliament. The days of taxation without re- presentation are past and gone. The public debt is undoubtedly that of the United Kingdom. One of the first questions to be considered would be the nature, amount, and the consequences of the contribution from Ireland to imperial expenditure. In consenting to argue the case, we assume that an agree- ment has been established to do so without reference to separation . We take for our basis the plan of the United States, which is not a federation of States, but of peoples. We preserve the Union. We admit no right in separate legislatures to infringe the Union. In the United States there is no federation of legislatures or of territories. When a common act is done, the proclamation does not run " We, the States, proclaim," or ' ' The Legislatures of the States proclaim ; " it runs, in all common concerns, " We, the people of the United States." The possible modifica- tion we are considering of the constitution of the United 10 IRELAND. Kingdom would, we may suppose, be quite external to all those matters which are in the United States within the domain of Congress. Throughout the Union, Congress has power to levy and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, to provide for the common defence and general welfare, to borrow money, to regulate commerce, to establish uniform naturalisation and bankruptcy laws, to coin money, to fix the standards of weights and measures and punish counterfeiting, to establish post offices and postal lines, to register patents and copyrights, to punish piracies, to declare war, raise armies and navies, to call out the militia, and to govern all places purchased for forts and arsenals. The several States of the Union possess all powers of local legislation, but they cannot make treaties, coin money, levy duties on imports, or exercise without consent any of the powers thus granted to Congress. The Supreme Court of the United States has jealously guarded the legal rights of Congress. When a State entered into a contract with certain Indians to except their lands from taxation, it was held that the exemption could not be revoked. The most learned writers on the American constitution have shown that the idea of a permanent and zealous co-operation of the several distinct governments in any scheme for the com- mon welfare is a visionary notion. They have shown that the navigation and commerce, the agriculture and manufactures of all the States have received an advancement in every direction throughout the Union which has far exceeded the most sanguine expectations of the warmest friends of the constitution, and they have described the fact of an unlimited commercial intercourse, without duty or restriction, between all the States, as of itself a blessing of almost inconceivable value. There was a time in the independent history of Ireland when her people were taxed ^350,000 a year to prevent the importation of British cottons. Following the pattern of the United States, there could be no revival of ARTHUR ARNOLD. 11 such injurious laws. The customs and excise system would remain one in all the United Kingdom. It is not difficult to disentangle the " loyalty" of certain classes in Ireland from their interest as landowners. The distinction must be drawn. They are loyal, but we should hear less of their loyalty if they could sell their Irish land at a good figure. I am not disposed to think their interests would suffer by such a change as we are considering. No law of an Irish Parliament could upon this basis annul the contract to pay judicial rent, nor transfer ecclesiastical possessions from the Protestant Episcopal to the Roman Catholic Church. No State Legislature in America has any power to destroy contracts. The Irish landlords and others of the Irish minority have strong claims, but they cannot demand that we should accept no change without being prepared to purchase their interest in their country. It is no answer to considerations such as these to suggest that stipulations of this sort, even if agreed to at the time of an amendment of the constitution, would not be observed by the Irish people. Our effort is not only to soothe Irish disaffection by every useful and proper means, but also to reach firm ground, on which, if need be, we can with a free conscience compel the obedience of Ireland. There are millions of English people, and their number is increasing every day, who cannot consent to make war upon Ireland, without an offer of the grant of some such institutions. I have been many times in Ireland, but never without a dis- tinct feeling that she needs a measure of Home Rule ; that it would be good for all ; that a country so large and so distinct, but without any local legislative power, is in an unwholesome unnatural condition. We may now progress in the supposition that, under these and possibly other limitations, a legislature may be granted to Ireland. Whether there should be one or two Chambers would be fair matter for argument. I think the Senate of 12 IRELAND. the United States is chargeable with the inferior character of the House of Representatives ; that it lowers the tone of the first Chamber by abstraction of the best men, and by making it less responsible. I should prefer a single Chamber, and we may suppose that there would be one such legisla- tive body in each of the three kingdoms. This would of course involve the eligibility of peers. The numbers might respectively be those of each kingdom in the Imperial Parliament, or larger if that were desirable. There need be no identity in the personntl of the local legislature and of the contingent to the Imperial Parliament. A great Liberal statesman of the last generation had a plan for establishing three such local Parliaments in Ireland : one for Munster and Connaught, one for Ulster, and another for Leinster. Of course, if Ireland preferred two legislatures, one for Northern and another for Southern Ireland, so much the better ; but it is of no use to set up such division against the wishes of the people. I cannot conceive that such a legislature would, under the limitations we have noted, be more unfavourable to the interests of property than the present condition. The apprehension of a strike against rent has been no novelty for many years. The fear of such a movement has found expression in the speeches of states- men throughout the century. I am quite disposed to think that Irish landlords would find in such a change better security for their property than in dragoons and armed policemen. The perpetual employment of armed force is impossible, and every application of it, without promise of home government, diminishes the value of the landlords' claim. Their hope is to get out of Ireland by some measure at the cost of the general treasury. But Parliament has made its farthest possible advance in that direction. I declare most sincerely, that if I were an Irish landlord and regarded nothing but my own interests, I would rather rest my hopes ARTHUR ARNOLD. 13 upon a resolute and combined appeal in an Irish Legislature than endure the wasting process which is now in prospect. The Government and people of Ireland may still be de- scribed in the words of Grattan : " A people ill-governed, and a Government ill-obeyed." One of the standing grievances of the Irish people is, that they contribute too much to the general revenue. I think the basis of their payment was unjustly fixed at the time of the Union. Mr. Jephson, in a very clever publication on the financial aspect of Home Rule, adds together the common charges for national debt, civil list, army and navy, legislature, foreign and colonial service, and for civil functionaries, makes the total in round numbers ^60,000,000, and proceeds, upon the Union basis, to divide this total into "15 parts for Great Britain and 2 for Ireland," making Ireland's contribution a little over ^7,000,000. It is suggested that this question of contribution would be a subject for endless difference. I think it would be so if the rude principles of the Union were continued. How did Lord Castlereagh arrive at the conclusion that the proportion was 15 to 2, or roughly 7 to i ? Ireland had then a totally separate system of customs and excise. There was no assessment for pro- perty and income tax. He had regard to the exports and imports of the two islands, and to the consumption of various commodities. He found that for 1798 the total trade of Ireland was ^10,925,916 ; that of Great Britain, ^73,961,299. He observed that in the consumption of seven commodities most in demand, the proportion was /| to i. Upon these and similar facts the contribution was fixed at 1 5 parts for Great Britain and 2 for Ireland ; an arrangement which, as Mr. Jephson says, lasted until the amalgamation of exchequers and of debts in 1816. It will be remembered that the relative proportion of the popula- tions was at that time very different. The data of 1798 are 14 IRELAND. no longer available, for no one can now distinguish with certainty the amount of customs or excise paid by Ireland. Of 1,000 chests of tea which pay duty in Liverpool, any number may be sent across to Ireland, where no duty would be payable. But we have far more accurate data than those which were at the command of Lord Castle- reagh. We have the figures of income tax. In Ireland, the system of assessment and collection is different from that in force in England and Scotland ; but the difference is rather in the official machinery than in the result, which is the fairest test of the ability of the two islands in regard to contribution. By the Act of Union, Great Britain and Ireland " united as to future expenses on a strict measure of relative ability." Those who adopt the measure of 15 to 2 at the present time could not be regarded as strict in adherence to truth or justice. The income tax returns for the year 1882-83 are conclusive. Schedules A, B, and D for Great Britain give a total of ^446,629,197; for Ireland, ^33,269,668 ; a proportion of nearly 13-! to i. In most calculations the Civil List and the National Debt are charged just as they stand in the estimates, to be paid in part by Ireland. But the Civil List charge is satisfied by the income of the Crown Lands Department. Irishmen may claim to examine the settlement of the Debt in 1 800- 1 6. The annual charge in 1799 for the debt of Great Britain was ^18,000,000, and of the Irish debt about ;i, 400,000. There can be no doubt that the debt of Great Britain was due in part to the cost of protecting Ireland equally with the shores of this island. I think the charge for imperial concerns admits of reduction ; there are many sinecures to be weeded out, many salaries are much too high, and the age of compulsory superannuation is certainly too low. Taking it at the present average of ARTHUR ARNOLD. 15 ^55,000,000, the contribution of Ireland upon the basis of the income tax would be about ^4,000,000. But it may be said : " Where is the use of discussing this proportion when the real question is, How will you make Ireland pay? Take Limerick for example, and the present refusal to defray the charge for police. It seems to me that the case of Limerick does not at all weaken the force of the arguments of the Irish majority; rather the contrary. We hesitate as to Limerick, because we know Ireland is ill- governed, and because we are sure that on the whole the game would not be worth the candle. But in that of the imperial contribution we cannot fail to admit that no just man would hesitate to take action. The imperial force would, if neces- sary, levy the charge, supported by the whole strength of British opinion and of whatever was just in Irish opinion. No difficulty is found in the United States in executing the decrees of the Supreme Court. Such a failure as that at Limerick could never occur. The veto is a most important point. It does not appear to me that the veto could or need be placed directly within the power of the Imperial Parliament. A Bill passed by the States of Jersey is not law until sanctioned by the Queen in Council, and by custom the Council advising Her Majesty is formed exclusively of Ministers of the Crown. Parliament has therefore indirect control over the legislation of Jersey by withdrawing its confidence from the Government. But this power would be inconsistent with a change such as would devolve certain affairs upon local Legislatures in Great Britain and in Ireland, or in each of the three kingdoms. If the change were made only in respect to Ireland, it would soon follow in regard to Scotland. In the United States the veto of the President and the power of Congress do not extend to Bills dealing with matters within the restricted domain of the State Legislatures. But in fact the veto 16 IRELAND. would be with the Imperial Government, because the Crown would nominate the viceroy or governor of Ireland. If he were subject to removal by the Crown, as are the governors of our colonies, the power of vetoing any Bill would be that of the Crown, which, if not advised in these matters by Imperial Ministers, would not be free from their influence. It is no lightsome duty to contemplate a great change in our constitution. We altered the balance of power in 1867 and in \ 884, but the writing of certain provisions into our constitution, involving changes of legislative authority, is a different matter. We must not do it in haste or without due cause. I have not dealt largely with the cause. Some will think the recent annals of Parliament are eloquent upon that point. Others feel that any concession is matter of justice or of expediency which would liberate their con- sciences and enable them, if need be, to draw the sword of justice against Ireland. I have rather chosen to assume that the motives for consideration of the claim are admitted. If there were no good reason, even the strongest would shrink from the task. Boldness is, according to Lord Bacon, the first quality of a statesman ; and it will be needed. " You might as well ask me to build a tree," said Lord Holland to Murat when the new King of Naples asked for the draught of a constitution. But we must remember that this claim of Ireland occurs at a time when Parliament has been found incompetent for the legislative work of the Empire. What precious years have we not wasted through this century in the effort to bind a Protestant system of education upon Ireland ! How natural it seemed to us, when the Australian Colonies desired a Federal Council Bill, to tell them to wait a year ! That is nothing in our legislative economy. We want and wait through one or two generations. So it has been with Land Law Reform ; so it may be with Church Reform. This Irish demand is enter- ARTHUR ARNOLD. 17 tained the more readily because it may summon us to a wise, just, and beneficial revolution, valuable not only to each of the three kingdoms, but to every portion of the Empire. For many years past there have been warnings of coming change. The late Lord Russell was no Radical, and his most mature thought found the following expression : "I do not think the relations of the colonies to the mother country can be kept up precisely in their present form. I am disposed to believe that if a congress or assembly, representing Great Britain and her dependencies, could be convoked from time to time, to sit for some months in the autumn, arrangements reciprocally beneficial might be made. The scheme may seem impracticable to many. But so did the Reform Act of 1832 ; so did the total repeal of the Corn Laws ; so did the abolition of the Irish Church. Great changes have been made ; great changes are impend- ing ; amid these changes there is no greater benefit to man- kind that a statesman can propose to himself than the consolidation of the British Empire." The time may soon come when the peoples of England, Ireland, and Scotland may be represented only in regard to common affairs by a Parliament of the United Kingdom, which may also be a Congress of the Empire. We may in days to come regard this pressure from Ireland even with grateful recollection, as having supplied the motive power for a useful reform. It may happen that in this Parliament of the future the federalisation of the Australian continent, or the reform of the Government of India, may be deemed of equal, if not greater and more pressing consequence, than the place of a blow-hole on the Underground Railway, or than a debate such as that of 1885, as to whether an Edinburgh hotel-keeper should or should not have to face the com- petition of another hotel at a railway station. No one will say that our Parliamentary system is perfect ; it attempts too much ; and the most contentious business, which is the most c 1 8 IRELAND. important, is consequently postponed from year to year. If we are to have change, let it be large as the principle involved, so that it may be lasting, and let us in all its provisions be careful to preserve that which has been held sacred by Liberal leaders since the dawn of reform " the unity of the Empire, and all the authority of Parliament necessary for the conser- vation of that unity." ARTHUR ARNOLD. HON. REGINALD B. BRETT. TS it not a fact, that for more than a century we have attempted to govern Ireland constitutionally ? Has the experiment succeeded ? Is it not probable that the failure is due largely to differ- ences of race and religion ? What analogous cases are there in history ? Are not Austria-Hungary, Russia-Poland, the least dis- similar ? What were the methods respectively adopted in these cases? Is not the successful stamping-out of rebellion and national life in Poland due to the circumstance that Russia was able to employ the coercive forces of a despotic form of government ? Did not the liberation of Hungary result from the cir- cumstance that Austria was only able to apply constitutional methods in the government of Hungary, and that the in- evitable result is the Autonomy of that nation ? Is not the case of the rebellion in the United States wholly different, because no ineradicable difference of race or creed divided North from South ? Is there any responsible statesman who now proposes to govern Ireland permanently by Martial Law ? Is there any large section of politicians who would advo- cate permanent application to Ireland of coercive measures ? Does the experience of the past afford much hope that party spirit will allow of a permanent combination of c 2 20 IRELAND. Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons against the Irish Representatives ? There cannot be any serious difference of opinion upon the answer to these questions ; but it is when we come to the inference to be drawn from them that the inclination to shrink from logical conclusions appears. Surely the experience of the past teaches us that timidity is the essence of Conservatism, and that no great reform has ever been carried through Parliament without honest prognostications, founded on the most honest convicfion, that the country was going inevitably to the devil. Men who maintain that the Irish people cannot be trusted in any degree because some Irishmen ha"ve be- haved brutally and dishonestly, ought to recollect that in 1832 it was stated often, and believed, that the English people could not be trusted because some Englishmen had behaved riotously and illegally. Austrians, before Count Beust carried his constitutional reforms, never wearied of pointing out that concessions to Hungarian sentiment meant the destruction of the Empire. Because Catholics supported the Pretender, how long was it before the majority of Englishmen could be got to believe that their Catholic fellow-countrymen could be patriots ? And after Lord Somers' Scottish Union, when Lord Chatham, with the brilliant audacity of genius, enrolled Highland regiments in the service of the State, how often was he told that he was drilling men whose arms would on the first opportunity be turned against their commanders ? Now, in another form, the old story is repeated. From the editors of the great metropolitan daily papers down to their eminent judicial correspondents, there is a chorus of doubt and distrust. No Sovereign Parliament for the United Kingdom could control a National Council for HON. REGINALD B. BRETT. 21 Ireland. That is the burden of their cry. The facts that in Germany a Sovereign Parliament controls Local Legis- latures, that in America the same thing occurs, that in the British Empire the most complete control is exercised by the Imperial Parliament over the Colonial Legislatures these facts do not convince them, or even shake their belief, that they may misjudge the Irish problem. Some time ago, before the startling so-called revelations from Hawarden appeared, I suggested the appointment of a Commiitee or Commission, representative of the two great parties in the State, and of the Irish party as well, to inquire into the present system of Irish administration, which is not understood by the majority of Englishmen, with a view to determining the limits within which Irish affairs can be administered locally, and the form of local government best suited to the requirements and resources of that country, consistent with the sovereignty of the Imperial Parliament. I still think such an inquiry desirable, and the course most likely to lead to practical results. Professor Seeley says, in his " History of Napoleon," that to be simply an emperor, to rule a country through an army, is to practise an easy art. It may be that we shall have to practise the easy art of governing Ireland by the sword. But who can doubt that this as a permanent policy will not meet the views of the English people? Consequently, statesmen will have sooner or later to grapple with the more difficult problem. If civil war is inevitable, it will cause less bitterness and lead to a surer peace after the experiment of Home Rule has failed than before it has been tried. REGINALD B. BRETT. MARQUIS OF LORNE. TRELAND depends financially on British connection. Geographically she must remain an integral part of the Imperial Three Kingdoms. Anything tending to throw her into antagonism to England and Scotland would harm her by driving away capital. Therefore, all armed forces and all departments expressive of sovereignty must be Imperial. Property acquired under Imperial title cannot be expro- priated. Home Rule, if it mean power to acquire property by purchase, and the subsequent control over it by pro- vincial bodies, may work for good. Assessory powers might be given to provincial areas for education and repay- ment of Imperial loans for purchase of property. County Councils might have similar powers for purposes requiring less money. The same purpose of multiplying freeholds and endowing education could be attained by constitution of separate Boards acting for the whole country. The powers asked for by the so-called National Party would be given by no American or colonial statesmen, whose chief care has been to prevent any unit of population from acquiring power which might be used to the disadvantage of the nation. LORNE. PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS, M.P. A /T EMBERS of Parliament who may take office, members of Parliament who are in office, and the Tory party generally, who profited by the Irish alliance at the late General Election, and who now appear to be repudiating their allies, are equally shy of stating what opinions they hold on the Irish question. From the point of view of party tactics it is not reasonable that statesmen out of office, but in waiting, should be called on to break silence. Nor is it strange, or even indecent, that the Government of Caretakers should be hesitating. It is a tradition with the Tory party to make very few promises, and the practice with them to break the few they do make. They never can and never will satisfy their followers and dupes. It would be instructive to illustrate the facts, but it would be a lengthy labour, and in the present case irrelevant. There is, however, no reason why men who do not expect office, who have given attention to public affairs, and are responsible to their constituents, should affect to be silent or oracular in the present crisis. It is the duty of such persons, however humble their political status may be, especially in face of the fact that more than half the present House of Commons are new men, not to affect silence, however abstinent they may have been in expressing their opinion when they were before their constituents. Let me briefly narrate the political history of Ireland. When its Parliament of English settlers was first established, 24 IRELAND. it was, as all the world knows, regulated by Poyning's Act, the one feature of which was that no legislative topic could be debated, and no Bill introduced into the Irish Parlia- ment, but by the express permission of the English Government. This was no particular servitude under the Tudors, for the English Parliament had not much greater initiatory power ; and the Scottish Parliament was, as Scotch constitutional antiquaries know, equally subjected to the Lords of the Articles. But the English Parliament emanci- pated itself, by the use of very energetic remedies, from the Crown, only to fall for nearly two centuries under the control of the House of Lords. The Scotch Parliament was incorporated about one hundred and eighty years ago with the English Parliament, and the Scotch nobility the most turbulent, corrupt, sordid, and rapacious aristocracy which has ever been heard or read of was fortunately attenuated in the English House of Lords. But the Irish Parliament remained in the chains of Poyning's Act for nearly three centuries. It represented about a fourth of the people, but of the Protestants only, or rather such of those persons as were qualified to vote. All the members had to belong to the dominant religion of the minority, and so absolutely dead was political feeling in Ireland that there was no real movement in the country, even when the most stirring passions were dominant in England and elsewhere. At last the awakening came. The foolish and wicked war with the American colonies brought England apparently more near prostration than at any time in her political or military history. It was really the King's war, and should be a caution for the English people never to let their sovereigns meddle in foreign politics. The sequel to it shows that the sovereign should be equally debarred from meddling in domestic politics, for the folly of George the Third was the beginning of the Irish difficulty. In 1779 the Irish were admitted by North to the benefits PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 25 of the English trade. In 1782 the Irish were, under the narrow franchise and sectarian conditions alluded to above, indulged by Fox with a replica of the English constitution. They were allowed to levy their own taxes, administer their own affairs, regulate their own trade, appoint their own officials, manage their own army, and decide their own appeals in their own House of Lords, as Englishmen were in theirs. The surrender was complete a surrender which Irishmen in our own day, and indeed for the last fifty years and more, have looked back to as the great charter of Irish liberty. If any one wishes to know how Irishmen thought and spoke when they gained the freedom of initiation as well as debate even though, I repeat, the speakers were the representatives of a narrow section out of a narrow Irish majority let him read the debate on Orde's Bill for regulating British and Irish commerce, in May 1785. The history of these memorable eighteen years has never been written, and yet these years are the cradle of Irish political opinion in the eighteenth century, and the key to Irish political opinion in the nineteenth. The Govern- ment which granted the constitution of 1782 began to conspire against it immediately. They had taken Poyning's Act away from the beginning of its proceedings, and they clapped it on to the end of its proceedings, as effectually as if the change had not been made. They developed in the Irish mind that distrust of all government which has made it so turbulent and so docile turbulent to its administrators, docile to its popular leaders. To reward an Irishman with office was to make him hateful to his countrymen ; and to be just, the most merciless oppressors of Irishmen were Irishmen. I do not think that politics ever bred a worse man than Lord Clare, and I am equally convinced that law has rarely produced a harder and more cruel one. The Irish showed what they thought of the man at his funeral. The insurrection of 1797-8 was the end of the free Irish 26 IRELAND. Parliament. English statesmen had before them these alternatives : They might yield to the claims of the United Irishmen, emancipate the Catholics, and trust to the effects of justice and political responsibility. This was what Pitt and Fitzwilliam wished, but the King strongly forbade it. There was the alternative of ruling Ireland as a Crown colony, without a constitution, and by a Privy Council of nominees. This was forbidden by English public opinion, by the state of public affairs, by the experience of the United States, and by the military dangers which beset the situation. The third alternative was the Parliamentary Union. To effect this it was necessary to corrupt the borough-mongers, and, as Irishmen tell us, the Union was purchased from the Irish aristocracy by hard British cash. The Irish Parliament was closed, and its premises let to a bank, where I presume the vendors invested the price which they had received. From 1800 begins a double struggle in Ireland : a struggle for the equitable occupation of land, and a struggle for the restomtion of that Parliament which, as time passed, the fond memory of the Irish has decorated with every virtue. The administrations of Ireland had one expedient for dis- affection, and that was a special criminal code for the island. The late Sir Robert Peel said, with excusable exaggeration, that he had never gone through a session in his parliament- ary career without taking part in a Scotch Salmon Bill and an Irish Coercion Bill. But to every claim of tenant rightj to every demand that the religious sentiments of the Irish should be respected and deferred to, the English Parliament was obstinately deaf. Even toleration, the most hateful word in politics, was refused for some thirty years after the Union. Nearly three-quarters of a century passed before the dominant Church of the minority was reconstructed ; more than this period passed before a system of equitable rents PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 27 was made a principle in the social politics of Ireland. Meanwhile, as may be expected, when justice is tardy, dis- content becomes envenomed, and the Irish, in a fit of petulance, which they call principle, have preferred their worst foes in a general election, to their cautious, lukewarm, but, for all that, historic friends. The revolt of the Irish a parliamentary revolt it is true, for none of them, except a few hair-brained fanatics, think of force is complete. No manipulation of figures can dispute that Mr. Parnell's followers represent current Irish opinion. I decline to believe that a nation terrorizes itself, or that the stupendous majorities by which the eighty-five were returned are an illustration of successful tyranny imposed by an ubiquitous organization. The representatives of ancient Whiggery, of modern Orangeism, of more modern Toryism, in contrast to which I admit the Toryism of England is gentle and generous, are cooped up in the north east corner of the island, in which they talk as Walker did not when the Anglo-Irish had experience of Tyrconnel's Parliament, and of the rapparees, whose name they have adopted. Once, by an accident no doubt, though he may have been misreported, that Parliament was declared by Mr. Parnell to be his ideal. The history of it, perhaps heightened, may be found in Macaulay's twelfth chapter. I think it may be taken for granted that special criminal legislation for Ireland the tradition of the English Govern- ment since the Union, the practice of the Government for centuries before it will not be revived. I am pretty confident that if the late Government had proceeded with the proposal which was foreshadowed before the defeat on the Budget, the Liberals below the gangway would have deserted them. I have little doubt that this was the reason why the late Government did not attempt to reverse the very retrievable 28 IRELAND. disaster of June 8. I made no secret of my resolve never to vote for another Irish Coercion Bill, and I know that my views were generally held by the advanced section of the Liberal party. It is, I think, a fundamental principle in the policy of the political unit, that its civil and criminal law should be identical in any one of the contingents which make up the unit This has been the tradition of British law. Fifty years ago there were agrarian disturbances in England, marked by outrages as bitter and as malignant as anything which has occurred in Ireland. They were not met by local Coercion Acts, but by remedial measures. At present the Tory party is committed against coercion, and the Radical party too. Very possibly, Lord Cowper may be in the right when he alleges that the strength of Mr. Parnell's party lies in the purposes of the Irish cottiers. I said so myself nearly eighteen years ago, when I studied the Irish land question on the spot, and wrote my conclusions in a letter to Sir John Gray, a letter which I reprinted and circulated in the House of Commons at the beginning of the late Parliament. I think it very likely that the Irish peasant farmer wants to ge't his rent at the lowest rate possible, and perhaps, as an Irishman (and a patriot) told me the other day, when this is achieved, to get his neighbour's farm as soon as possible. An Irishman believes, and with good reason, that he has given his land all the value it has. He does not realize the Ricardian theory of rent. He thinks maybe that he owes to the Land League the Act of 1881, and the interpretation he puts on it. Do not his newspapers say so, and does he not believe the modern sophist as fervently as the average Englishman is reputed to swallow his Times ? This is not the sole motive of the revolt, though a powerful one. I wonder whether easy-going people see that PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 29 the same process is going on in Great Britain. What else is the meaning of the crofter successes in North Scotland, the political discontent already almost organized in Wales, the revolt of the peasantry in the extremities of England, and the desperate efforts of imperilled landowners to hold their own by intimidation, by the passionate adoption of the Duke of Westminster's manifesto, by the " profligate lying of virtuous women," by the intimate association of parsons, publicans, primroses, and peers ? But, on the other hand, if the demands of the Irish are so hateful to England, how is it that the Irish in England live so amicably with their English fellow-workmen ? The alliance of the Tories and Irish in the boroughs of Lancashire and some Yorkshire towns has not stirred the English patriot in those districts to avenge himself on this portentous combination. In South and East London there is a very large Irish element : it did not raise the percentage of voters over its normal 70 to 75 per cent, of the register. In point of fact, I suspect that the English workman believes that both the historical parties are equally insincere ; the Irishman, more impulsive, fancies they are equally squeezable. An Irishman you can see it all through the report of Sir Eardley Wilmot's Committee is entirely convinced of the backwardness, the poverty, the hopelessness of his country. His economical remedies for instance, those of Mr. Parkinson may be immeasurably grotesque, but they are none the less instructive. They are the natural commentary on the process by which Ireland has been governed by Englishmen, with the best intentions, but on old Whig principles and by old Whig methods. For eighty-five years there have been tardy concessions, capricious grants of public money, and ready coercion. It may be true that the Government has been forced to employ English, because no Irishman would have had the courage, by taking office in the 30 IRELAND. Irish administration, to incur the hatred and the execrations of his fellow-countrymen. It may be doubted if in the last Parliament the office most unwisely given to Mr. Forster had been given to the O'Conor Don, or to some other Irish gentleman of such high merit and unimpeachable character, the disasters of Mr. Gladstone's Irish administration would, as I believe, have been obviated. But if it be true that an Irishman holding confidential relations with the English Government cannot retain the simultaneous confidence of his own countrymen, what a satire is the fact on the policy of the last eighty-five years ! Has it come to this ? Has the English Government so demoralized the Irish that they will have no confidence or trust in any Irishman who allies with it, or even negotiates with it ? Of course, as a matter of fact, Ireland, with the semblance of parliamentary equality, with the reality of parliamentary institutions, and with a slowly but fully developed power of entangling English public business, has been ruled as a Crown colony, because she has not been ruled by her own people. The highest office in the country is bestowed on an English nobleman, generally in difficulties. The Irish Secretary is the head of every department. He is Secretary of State, President of the Local Government Board, of the Board of Trade, of the Board of Works, of Education of everything. He is now never an Irishman, he his rarely in the Cabinet, and generally his initial qualification is a profound ignorance of Ireland and Irish affairs. I confess, if I were an Irishman, and had such experiences as Irishmen have of the administration of Irish affairs, I should be tempted to be- a rebel, and I should not be surprised if I were called a village ruffian. I cannot, therefore, accept Lord Cowper's explanation of Irish disaffection as complete. That Mr. Parnell would have had but a limited success if he had relied on the PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 31 Home Rule feeling only, I can well believe. The sym- pathy with political reform is partial at most times. It rises to an almost revolutionary force when it is believed to be the only remedy for intolerable social evils. The enthusiasm of the tiers etat in 1789, the uprising of the English people in 1832, were in the highest degree excep- tional. But if a politician can enforce on his disciples that the only remedy for social mischief and economical degradation is a vast political change, and he can win a little of his programme from those who dread the change, he has the key of the situation in his hand. The Home Rule movement would, I daresay, have languished even if the Irish had been fed to repletion with calumnies against the English people. But the Home Rule move- ment, as a means for enforcing terms from the Irish land- lord, has been an irresistible bait. My wonder is, that no Irish politician had previously to Mr. Parnell combined the tactics of Mr. O'Connell and those of Mr. Sharman Crawford. The common criticism on the Irish people is, that they cannot govern their own country. If this were true, what is the good of mocking them with the semblance of parlia- mentary power? The true theory of the constitution is that the Ministry are the servants of the House of Commons i.e., of the English people through their representatives. A decorous fiction calls them the Ministers of the Crown, but unless we are to have the scenes of the Short and Long Parliament of 1640 re-enacted, the House of Commons makes them and unmakes them. But no one doubts that in the Scottish kingdom Scotch public opinion must be consulted. Parliament has lately created a Scotch Minister of State. The office is filled by a nobleman, a great Scottish landowner, who if he is descended from Louisa of Portsmouth, is also descended from the Duke 32 IRELAND. of Gordon. Would the Scotch have been satisfied if an Englishman, without a drop of Scotch blood or a scintilla of Scotch interest, had stepped into the place ? But what Irish interests do Lords Cowper, Spencer, Carnarvon, Mr. Forster, Mr. Trevelyan, and Sir W. Hart Dyke repre- sent, excellent men as they may be, except the convenience of ulcerating Irish disaffection. I set very little in the present situation by the weakness of Irish industry, the want of economical versatility in the Irish people, and the incessant mendicancy of Irish patriots. The Irish have been denied the responsibilities of govern- ment till they charge Government with all their misfortunes, and even refuse to give any but the vaguest answer to the natural question, What is your remedy for your own discontent? I know nothing in history like the condition of the Irish people, except that of the Spanish settlements in the New World. It is well known that there the Spanish Government not only administered colonial affairs from Madrid, but debarred even the purest-blooded Spaniard who was born in the colony from filling any responsible office in it. Every one who was to be trusted with public business was sent from Spain. Can it be a pride to the English race that it has by hard pains and little wisdom, in aristocratic interests, bred a Mexico or a Peru at its very doors, which it cannot trust with its own affairs, from which it receives year after year intolerable affronts, which it cannot bear with patience or treat with dignity, which it must perchance leave to the irregular rule of a double foreigner, because it will not allow, under intelligible com- promises, a portion of the English-speaking race to work out its own social problems by its own agencies ? Is it not a problem worth solving, when, as we are told, the success- ful resistance to a contract rent which was an injustice, and now to an arbitrated rent which honestly endeavours PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 33 to obviate an injustice, is so eating into the morality of the Irish people, that credit is almost a thing of the past, that traders live on ready money, that no one can trust his neighbour, and that mad newspapers are even striving to destroy public credit? These statements, freely made to me by Irishmen, are, it may be, exaggerations, but they must be probabilities. More than twenty years ago, my distinguished friend Mr. Goldwin Smith, and I, as an humble fellow-worker with him, pointed out in the Daily News and Star news- papers how dangerous and demoralizing was the policy which Lord Palmerston's Government was pursuing with the colonies. At that time half the British army was in these dependencies, and every particle of British spirit was out of them. We insisted that political independence and respon- sibility should go together, and that no nation was worth keeping which would not or could not undertake its own defence. We were of course soundly rated for our presump- tion by the editors, but we can point to the present position of these colonies, and the close approach which they have made to the ideal which we strove at that time to set up, as a proof that the principles which we advocated were sound, and that we were really working for the unity of the Empire. The political victory of Mr. Parnell's party is practically complete. It was a faction in the last Parliament, it is a power in this ; and I notice with satisfaction that its language is infinitely more temperate than it was a twelvemonth ago. It is in the nature of things that a victorious party becomes, if fairly used, always moderate. Its leaders say, and say, I make no doubt, with truth, that they do not wish to ruin their country, still less to be at variance with their country- men. They can afford to pass by the Bobadils of the Orange party. They know that they must make their arrangements D 34 IRELAND. and negotiate their treaty with the British nation, and with one party only in it. Ireland, in consequence of the unhappy schooling of centuries, is a nation without a policy, without parties ; factions taking the place of parties, without responsibilities. All the charges which have been made against the Irish are simply tributes to the truth of what all genuine students of Irish history have to admit, that the faults of its present age are to be traced to its bringing-up. No child, spoilt at one time, severely chastised at another, has been educated in such a political nursery of caprice as Ireland has been. She has been debarred from having national leaders and a mature purpose, because it has been the constant practice to exclude the former from affairs and to thwart the latter. The Scotch, after the accession of the House of Stuart, were treated as harshly by the English Government as the Irish were. Scotland had an aristocracy infinitely worse than the Irish was, even in its worst times. The religious persecution under which Ireland suffered during the existence of the Penal Code was gentleness itself when compared with the cruelties inflicted on the Scotch Presbyterians. To increase the bitterness of the Scotchman's lot, the worst cruelties were inflicted by men who had affected in their earlier days to sympathize with the national cause, the national religion ; but who, turning renegade, became the familiars and execu- tioners of that Scotch Inquisition which was established after the Restoration. Scotch trade was crippled as mercilessly by the English Parliament, for a century after the union of the crowns, as Irish trade was from the days of the Pensionary Parliament of the Restoration till the legislation of 1779. The Scottish union of 1706 was obtained by agencies as questionable as those which characterized the Irish union of 1800. It was, it must be admitted, followed by nearly as much discontent. The representation of the Scotch people PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 35 in'' Parliament, up to 1832, was far more scandalous than that of England or Ireland. But the Scotch always remained a nation with definite ends and aims, though the political educa- tion of Scotland grew under all these difficulties. In the north of Scotland, where the patriarchal theory of tribal government had prevailed, the people suffered more wrongs than the Irish did . The Irish were, it is true, transferred from old lords to new ones.thelatterbeingalienstothemin race and religion. But the Scottish clansman found that the father of his tribe became its tyrant when taught by the lawyers of Edinburgh how to turn his shadowy rights of headship into the highly advan- tageous status of a law-made landlord. I doubt whether the Irish ejections ever reached the cruelty and harshness of the Highland clearings. I know no ingratitude more' callous than the conduct of those chieftains who repaid the devotion of their followers by the expatriation of their clans- men. It is true that there is plenty of discontent in Scotland, and that the discontent is taking a highly practical turn ; but during the long age of oppression the Scottish nation has neither halted, nor lost place, nor lost heart, nor failed to make progress. For with all the faults of the Scotch administration, Scotland, even when misgoverned, was governed by her own children. The problem before the English Parliament is not whether the claims of this or that party are to prevail, not whether the demands which I presume the Irish Nationalists will make should be conceded, not whether this or that interest should be guaranteed, protected, preserved ; but how the scandalous, the intolerable reproach of the present condition of Ireland shall be removed or reformed, how Ireland shall be made capable of self-government, and be turned from hatred towards England into amity towards England. The problem must be solved, and solved early. We cannot, for our credit, now that the affairs of England are at last in D 2 36 IRELAND. the hands of the people of England, permit that the scandal of a poor, an angry, a rebellious nation should remain close to our doors. To my mind the only solution of the problem, the only remedy for the scandal, is to be found in the transference of the responsibilities of self-government to those of the Irish people whom the Irish people may desire to trust their for- tunes to. There is no question that the political unity of Ireland and Great Britain must continue. No reasonable person in Great Britain holds that Ireland should have entire political independence, the independence which was conceded in 1782. The experiment was tried, and failed. I suspect that most of the people who talk about Grattan's Parliament know very little of its history, less of its policy, least of all about the inherent vices of its constitution vices which would reappear in 1886 as surely as they were manifest just about a century ago. Pitt took the precedent of the Scottish union, and would, but for the obstinacy of the King, have established as complete, or nearly as complete, a re- ligious equality in Ireland as the Ministers of Queen Anne discovered or conceded in Scotland. Nor do I discover that any responsible Irishmen are demanding the political isolation of Ireland. The nearest analogue to the reform of Irish abuses, and the development of political and social responsibility in Ireland, is the State of the American Union. The State in the Federal Constitution elects its head or governor, has its elective Senate and House of Representatives, possesses the power of enacting local laws and of imposing direct taxation on property, real and personal. It has its own police under its own management, and superintends the education of the young within its own boundaries, though this education is not sectarian ; while it provides from its own resources the cost of this education, which is free. But PROF. JAMES . THOROLD ROGERS. 37 it can impose no customs duty or excise ; it can shelter no offender against the criminal law, and protect no citizen against civil process ; it cannot have its own currency laws, but must submit to those of the Federal Union ; it cannot have its own bankruptcy law ; it has no authority whatever over army, navy, or militia ; it has nothing to do with the national defence or with foreign policy ; and it can de- cline no burdens which the authority of Congress imposes on it for federal purposes. The proceedings of the Federal Congress and the States representatives are liable to a double veto, direct and indirect ; the former being that of the Pre- sident and Governor, which may be overridden ; the latter that of the Supreme Court, which decides on the question whether enactments are constitutional or not, and disallows them in the latter contingency. Most educated Americans believe that the power of the Supreme Court is very salutary. The exercise of this power is of course judicial, and is accompanied by reasons. Now, in my opinion, something closely analogous to this constitution should be conferred on the Irish people. I am persuaded that the same sort of constitution should be given to Scotland, Wales, and North and South England. It exists in the United States, beause the early members of the Union were familiar with self-government, and had long elaborated its system before the War of Independence occurred. A system of local or State government has not been developed in England, though constitutional anti- quaries are well aware that its construction would be merely the restoration of a system which is older than the monarchy, infinitely older than the two Houses of Parliament, and still more ancient than the unsatisfactory system of lords- lieutenant, county magistrates, and non-elective boards. The establishment of such a local Parliament in Ireland, call it by what name you will, would instantly throw on the 391)765 38 IRELAND. Irish people the obligation and the responsibility of adjust- ing and harmonizing its whole social system. I decline to believe that were such a concession made, or rather such an act of duty and wisdom done, that Ireland would at once begin to commit political suicide. Instead of being ruled by others as hitherto, and of being consequently hostile to all government, it would have to rule itself, and con- sequently, by the law of self-preservation, would be forth- with loyal to government. Whether the work would be carried out by the present representatives of Irish discontent is a question the answer to which does not concern the inhabitants of Great Britain, but is a matter which may be entirely left to the Irish people. It is, howeverj clear that in politics the critical faculty is entirely different from the constructive faculty, and the latter will, in such a new state of things, be the needful quality. I do not remember that Mr. Parnell's followers have ever exhibited the slightest trace of any ability for constructive legislation, however highly their critical powers may have been developed, schooled, or manipulated. Great dread is expressed about committing to the local and elected authorities in Ireland the management of their own police, with the duty, of course, of meeting as much of its cost as is imposed on English ratepayers. But the answer is, that if you diminish the powers of local self- government in matters entirely local, you diminish/^ tanto that responsibility which is the crying defect in the local administration of Ireland. And if it be answered, that the Irish people, through their local representatives, would use their own police system as the training-ground for a national force, to be employed for seditious purposes and ultimately for a military struggle, the answer is twofold. First, the satisfaction of national aspirations and the concession of national responsibility would at once cut away the ground PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 39 for that political discontent which manifests itself in political outrages and Fenian vapourings; for patriotic Irishmen, however wrong-headed, could hardly hate, and strive to over- throw by violence, the Government of their own choice. And next, the act would be as much an act of rebellion, to be put down peremptorily and instantly, as the attempt of an American State to organize an army or a militia, with the object of resistance to the Federal Government, would be. Some rhetorical politicians have argued that concessions of self-government to Ireland should be accompanied by guarantees for the protection of certain kinds of property, and particularly the judicial rents, and for securing the rights, or even the existence, of the minority. Now, I can conceive nothing more dangerous to the minority than a guarantee of its rights or its existence. There is no reason to believe that the Irish minority will be sacrified, however provoking its attitude is, and however shallow and unreal is its claim to exceptional loyalty. Bat if the law tells the majority that it distrusts the intentions of the majority towards the minority, it suggests the policy which it intends to deprecate. One would have thought that by this time the value of legislative guarantees had been sufficiently discounted. When Dissenters were admitted to municipal rights they were compelled to declare or make oath that they would do nothing to weaken the influence of the Established Church. They accepted the condition, and answered it with an organi- zation against the Establishment. Parliamentary guarantees are of the nature of promissory oaths, which have never secured what they aimed at viz., loyalty to forms of govern- ment and reigning families, and that political orthodoxy which is supposed to be developed from religious conformity. Plenty of oaths were taken on behalf of James II., and few were kept. The early Hanoverian succession was girdled 40 IRELAND. by promissory oaths, and yet no one accused Shippon and his Jacobite followers in the Commons with perjury. The judicial rents must be left to the new and natural course of events. People absurdly talk about Parliamentary titles, and hint not obscurely that this makes the rent which issues from. a parliamentary title a vested interest. But all that the Encumbered Estates Court gave was a clear title barring all prior claims. It no more guaranteed rents than the parliamentary title to railway stock guarantees divi- dends. Many of the purchasers under the courts doubled their rents, without having laid out a shilling on their new possessions. Some, as the Scotch say, " gat a gliff," and reversed their policy. But the landlord cannot get a rent when the produce of the tenant's little holding, however fertile his patch may be, does not come to more than the necessaries of life. He cannot get a rent if the holding is larger, but the value of its produce will only keep the tenant going and the land in heart. Hence the Irish Nationalists, with a true interpretation of the facts, insist on migration, and are opposed to emigration. Their action is certainly disinterested, for an expatriated and disaffected Irishman is a far more able and lavish contributor to the funds of the National League than any can be who win a scanty subsistence in the three southern provinces. They are also, in their contention, the best friends of the land- lords ; but it is certain that a fair-sized and prosperous homestead is a far better rent agency than a scanty and barren one can be. Nor can any one doubt that, however sacred rent may be, national and even personal existence are more sacred. But I firmly believe that, with a wide and efficient system of self-government, all alarms will be found to be baseless. The most fertile field for ambitious and shallow demagogues is well-grounded discontent. The least hopeful prospect for PROF. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 41 them and I am far from saying that Mr. Parnell and his followers are unpatriotic is genuine responsibility, such as the obligation of managing the internal affairs of the Irish nation would be. One of the few wise things which Henry the Eighth said or did was his answer and action about the Gerald of his day. No one, he was told, in Ireland can govern the Gerald. Then said he, " Gerald is the man to govern Ireland." Ireland has chosen Mr. Parnell as its leader. I would give Ireland the opportunity of making him her Minister. It will be time to think of taking away from the Irish the rights of representative government when they have failed to carry out a workable form of local self-government. On the lines which I have sketched the distribution of local and imperial taxation in Ireland is self-adjusting, just as those of an American State and of the Federal Govern- ment are. If Ireland undertakes the management of her internal affairs, she must pay the cost of her own machinery. To claim the assistance of England in this necessary duty is mendicancy, and should be repudiated, not only in the interest of the English taxpayer, but as dangerous to Irish self-respect and genuine independence. But while the imperial revenue from Ireland, levied on precisely the same lines as in England and Scotland, and collected by the officers of the Empire, should go into the imperial ex- chequer, the defences of Ireland, its harbours, those of its public charges which are part of the machinery of inter- national police and international duty, its contingent of the army, the militia, and the debt, should be, must be, under imperial control and maintained from the imperial ex- chequer. JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D, T T is a fundamental principle of true Liberalism, that every distinct nationality or separate community has a right to be governed in whatever manner it thinks best. This principle may sometimes be in abeyance in the case of conquered or subject nations who are different in race from their conquerors and lower in the scale of civilization, or in that of colonies or partially settled territories which are either not sufficiently homogeneous or sufficiently populous to render local self-government practicable or even desirable but for all distinct nationalities who are in the same scale of civilization as their rulers the principle is fully applicable, and Liberals invariably applaud every claim of such peoples for self-government, while they as invariably condemn as tyrannous and unjust the refusal to comply with their de- mands by any more powerful Government which may have held the claimants in subjection. Our sympathy was given to Greece in its rebellion against Turkey ; to Hungary when demanding a national government from Austria ; to Italy when fighting to free Naples, Rome, and Milan, and to establish Italian unity ; and we now give our best wishes to the Bulgarians in their earnest struggle for union under one free and national Government. And in every case in which it has been fairly tried among a nearly homogeneous people the result has been satisfactory ; peace, progress, and con- tentment taking the place of ever-recurring revolt and chronic discontent. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D. 43 Liberal opinion being thus so uniformly favourable to the claims of any distinct European nationality to freedom and self-government, it is surely inconsistent for Liberals not to be equally favourable to the claims of Ireland. The case is not, it is true, exactly comparable to that of any of those we have just referred to, but in the eyes of an unprejudiced observer the difference is all in favour of the sister isle. The Irish are a distinct race, with a national history, language, and literature of their own. They differ from us in religion. They have been ruled by us as a conquered nation for many centuries, and they have never ceased to claim and to struggle for their freedom. It is true that the tyranny and oppression which we so long exercised in Ireland is now a thing of the past, but the form of representative govern- ment which we have given them is not a reality, because Irishmen are necessarily a minority in the British Parlia- ment ; and so great are the prejudices of a conquering race and a hostile religion, that to this day Catholic Ireland is ruled by English rather than by Irish ideas, and by means of Englishmen and Protestants, instead of by Irishmen and Catholics. Such a government, even if good in itself, can never be acceptable to the people governed. We have now by an extended franchise given Ireland the opportunity of declaring its wishes. It has decided almost unanimously that it demands self-government, not as an independent State, but as an integral part of the British Empire ; and to refuse this demand is to abandon the first and most essential principle of true Liberalism. At the same time, self-preserva- tion is a primary law of nature for States as for individuals, and we are perfectly justified in insisting upon such a real and effective union of the two countries under the Supreme Government as shall conduce to the stability and peace of the United Kingdom. But with this proviso the demand of Ireland for internal self-government should be granted 44 IRELAND. freely and unreservedly. Thus alone shall we be able to satisfy the just expectations of the Irish people ; thus alone shall we secure their friendship and respect, and in no distant future find in Ireland a source of national strength, instead of being, as hitherto, a constant thorn in our -side and a perpetual drain upon our resources. There are, however, two special sources of difficulty in Ireland which require to be considered before we can determine upon the lines within which we may allow com- plete self-government. These are, of course, religion and landlordism. The Roman Catholic religion prevails over by far the larger part of Ireland ; but in the north-east, and especially in the four counties of Londonderry, Antrim, Down, and Armagh, Protestants of a very pronounced type form the bulk of the population. These counties have shown their wish to remain under direct English rule by returning almost exclusively Conservative members to the present Parliament ; and exactly the same Liberal principles which compel us to grant self-government to the great bulk of the Irish people forbid us to force these northern dis- tricts into a union which is repulsive to them, and which would inevitably lead to extreme dissatisfaction and perhaps even to civil war. That it is the only true policy to allow populations, separated from their neighbours by religion, race, or local prejudice, to decide for themselves under what Government they wish to live, is well illustrated by the example of the Canadian Dominion. At first, British Columbia and Prince Edward's Island declined to join the four united provinces, but a few years later they voluntarily entered the Dominion ; while Newfoundland still remains a separate colony. Happily, neither England nor Canada seeks to force this small colony to unite with its neighbours, and it is not alleged that evil results have followed this course ; while it is almost certain ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D. 45 that at some future time the union will be voluntarily made. In like manner, if the Protestant and Conservative portion of Ulster is now permitted to choose its own form of govern- ment, all the difficulties arising from a forced union will be avoided : while it is not improbable that in course of time the antagonism that now prevails may die out, and the desire to form part of a United Ireland lead to an ultimate voluntary union. The other difficulty arises from the fact that the land of Ireland is largely owned by Englishmen or by absentees ; that the people have been subjected to much oppression by landlords or by their agents, and have been often evicted to make room for new tenants or to form extensive grazing farms ; and that there is still a prevalent wish to get rid of landlords altogether, and to establish a peasant proprietary over the whole country. It is therefore feared that an Irish Parliament will endeavour to obtain the land for the people, either without payment to existing landlords, or with alto- gether inadequate compensation. It cannot be said, however, that the representatives of the Irish National party have given any reason to suppose that they would sanction such a course, while many of them have openly advocated the purchase of the land at its fair value. It must be remembered that a considerable number of the Irish members are themselves landowners ; that besides the great landlords there are a large number of others who have comparatively small estates and are mostly residents ; and that any general scheme of confiscation would receive so much opposition and lead to such disastrous consequences that it would hardly be attempted. But if there may be sup- posed to be any danger of such unjust legislation, it would be rendered impossible by the power of veto, which, as in the case of all our colonies, is retained by the Crown, and which, if any attempt were made to confiscate the property of 46 IRELAND. British subjects, would certainly be exercised. It may also be urged that to assert beforehand that we know the Irish Parliament -will make a bad use of its power, is to repeat the universal plea of the despot who denies freedom to his subjects. Experience shows us that newly enfranchised peoples do not usually make a bad use of their liberty. They are in most cases very anxious to justify themselves in the eyes of other nations, and are careful not to prove themselves unfit for freedom by entering on a course of legislation which would be repugnant to every civilized Government. We shall only condemn ourselves if we declare our belief that seven centuries of English rule has so debased the Irish character that her people are not fitted to enjoy that measure of self-government which Bulgarians and Servians, but newly released from Turkish misrule, have shown themselves well qualified for, and by which they have already so greatly benefited. Having thus laid down the general principles which should guide us in approaching the question of Irish self- government, it remains only to indicate in what manner it may best be brought about, and what limitations, if any, we should impose upon its exercise. In determining these points we find valuable precedents in the history of the Canadian Dominion. Nearly half a century ago, both Upper and Lower Canada were driven into actual rebellion by somewhat similar causes to those which excite dissatisfaction in Ireland the action of an executive, appointed by the English Government, in opposi- tion to the wishes of the people. From the time when free representative institutions were granted to the people of Canada all such troubles were at an end. Other difficulties arose, however, from the union of the two Canadian pro- vinces, which differed fundamentally in race and religion ; Lower Canada being mostly French and Roman Catholic, ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D. 47 while Upper Canada was English and Protestant. The antagonism of these two parties often led to disputes and to a dead-lock in the government, which their separation under the Dominion, with the free control of their internal affairs, has completely set at rest. We have here a most important lesson as to the impolicy of attempting to force any-con- siderable population into a union which is opposed either to its racial or religious prejudices. The great success which has attended the federal union of the several Canadian provinces invites us to consider how this success has been attained ; and we find that we may fairly impute it to our having thrown upon the provinces to be united the responsibility of determining the limits of provincial and federal authority. Delegates from the several provinces settled the details" and deter- mined the precise terms of the Act of Union, and Lord Carnarvon, the then Colonial Secretary, bore testimony to the statesman-like qualities which were displayed in the settlement of sectional difficulties, the unravelling of knotty points, the mutual forbearance, and the zeal and assiduity displayed during the prolonged sittings of the conference. When the Bill, thus carefully elaborated, was introduced into Parliament by Lord Carnarvon, it was received with approbation by all parties, and passed through all its stages in both Houses of Parliament in less than a month. If now we consider that in this case there were antagonisms of race and of religion hardly less pronounced than those between Ireland and England or between Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Ulster, that two of the provinces had been in rebellion against the mother country, and that the smaller colonies which were included in the union had many sectional jealousies and local prejudices, it seems probable that the scheme which finally harmonized all these conflicting elements will afford the surest guide in 48 IRELAND. our endeavours to formulate a system of union between Ireland and England. It is true that some of the Irish Nationalists claim the larger amount of independence which we have granted to our various colonies, but the more moderate among them have indicated that of the separate provinces of the Canadian Dominion as the minimum they are prepared to accept. If now the Liberal party adopt this same amount of self-government as indicating in general terms the maximum they are prepared to grant, a common basis of negotiation will be established, and there will assuredly be no difficulty in agreeing upon the details of a Bill which, if frankly supported by the whole body of Irish Nationalists and English Liberals, can be carried by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, and will therefore, after a struggle, be passed by the Upper House. The Act establishing the Dominion of Canada gives to the people of each province the complete control of every- thing pertaining to their internal affairs, subject only to their allegiance to a common sovereign, and their duties as members of the British Empire ; while the Federal Govern- ment (which in the case of Ireland would be the Parliament of the United Kingdom) enacts all the laws in which the whole community have a common interest, such as those relating to trade and commerce, navigation, fisheries, indi- rect and direct taxation, postage, and criminal law. Taking this division of functions as a guiding principle, the problem is how to apply it in the case of Ireland, and it is certain that a satisfactory result will never be reached by the method hitherto adopted in all special legislation for that country, that of carefully avoiding direct consultation with the representatives of the Irish people. The obvious course seems to be for the British Govern- ment (which I assume to be a Liberal one) to appoint a ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D. 49 body of delegates to meet an equal number of delegates appointed by the Irish Nationalist representatives, in order to draw up a Bill establishing self-government for Ireland on the basis of the relation of a Canadian province to the Dominion. Points of difficulty should be referred back to the general body of Irish representatives, and to the English Ministry, so that when finally settled the Bill may be carried through Parliament without needing substantial alteration. At the same time (or before, if possible), a Bill establish- ing a very broad system of local self-government in the three kingdoms should be brought forward, and this having been carried, the determination of the exact mode of Irish representation in the House of Commons would be greatly facilitated. The usual objection, that if English members take no part in legislation for Ireland, it would be unfair to allow Irish members to interfere in English legislation, would cease to have any weight, because all (or almost all) the powers of self-government given to Ireland as a whole (ex- cept Protestant Ulster) would be also given to the counties, or larger divisions of England, Wales, and Scotland ; and the Imperial Government would in future have to deal only with matters affecting the external relations of the country at large, or with those branches of legislation expressly excepted from the scope of the Irish Parliament or the English councils. Parliamentary legislation would hence- forth be essentially British and Imperial, and in such a Parliament Ireland would have a just claim to her full share of representation, while some of her best men should form part of every British Ministry. Whether the Irish Parliament should consist of the same men who are chosen to sit at Westminster, or should form a distinct body, is a question that purely concerns the Irish people, and should be left for them to decide. There would E 50 IRELAND. evidently be many advantages in having only one body of representatives. The best men in the country would be available for the home government, and they would certainly learn something by experience gained in the British Par- liament. The office of representative would rise in im- portance and dignity, while members of the two Parliaments would more fully realize their responsibility, and be less likely to rush into hasty and ill-considered legislation. It would be easy to arrange the sittings of the Irish Parliament so as not to interfere with ours, and it must be remembered that when all local affairs are settled by local authorities, the sessions of the Imperial Legislature will not require to be nearly so long or so laborious as they are now. This matter is, however, essentially one that Ireland should decide for herself, and no attempt should be made to interfere with her free decision as to the numbers and qualifications of the members constituting her domestic Legislature. In thus endeavouring to point out what should be the attitude of the Liberal party towards Ireland at the present crisis I have aimed at formulating principles rather than discussing details. Above all things, it seems to me neces- sary that Liberals should justify the appellation they have chosen for themselves by approaching the consideration of this momentous question in a spirit of sympathy for the aspirations of the Irish people, and of true charity in avoiding imputations of bad motives or predictions of inevitable failure. If we do this honestly and fearlessly, we shall reap our reward in the establishment, for the first time in history, of a really United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. ALFRED R. WALLACE. ANNA BATESON. TT would have been well for the world had the fact always been borne in mind that nations have a good deal of human nature about them, just as individuals have. If you wish to win regard, you must earn it by bestowing regard. Those who are treated with contempt, suspicion, and dislike, will be sure to repay your bad opinion by showing you the worst side of their character. Those who are never permitted to act for themselves must in the end become helpless. These are mere truisms as between man and man ; but no attempt is made to apply these natural principles as between nations. For this neglect of common- sense diplomacy must take the chief share of blame. Indeed, there are few features in modern political develop- ment more promising than the decay which has overtaken the business of diplomatists, with all their paraphernalia of State secrets, hidden schemes, and dark intrigue. To the minds of crafty Ministers managing affairs in the olden time any course of action which was simple carried its own condemnation on its very face. To begin with, their own vanity could not be flattered by any course which was simple and straightforward. They must, above all things, exhibit their own cleverness ; they must shine, they must outwit the rival statesmen of the E 2 52 IRELAND. neighbouring country. Peace and goodwill among men were almost impossible while this went on, and while the people were kept in the dark and only treated like so many puppets at the pleasure of the wire-pulling rulers. All this is changed. At the present day " the people " are to the front ; and the golden rule of doing as you would be done by has some chance of being attended to. Now, the first thin? we have to do when we have injured our neighbour, arad are convinced of our error, is frankly to admit that we have been wrong. This is the first step, and it should be taken before any other can succeed. There have been signs lately, not a few, of a new and remarkable awakening of the English conscience in regard to the sister isle. Sad to say, we have been roused from our ignorant apathy by terrible events, by outrage and crime. These things have not terrorized us, but they have edu- cated us. We have been stirred to ask what are the causes leading to such dire results, and our complacency has been shaken. It was instructive to watch during the recent election addresses how wide of their mark fell the words of candi- dates appealing to their audiences for power to quell Irish faction. Silence for the most part, sometimes murmurs, scarcely ever anything like hearty applause, greeted such appeals ; they fell flat. A leaven has begun to work in the minds of our people, and it is by no means impossible that they may take up the question of Irish wrongs, as they have from time to time taken up popular movements in countries more remote. Why should we know or care so little about Ireland, the misgovernment of which lies directly at our own door, while we can stir the land from end to end on the subject ANNA BATESON. 53 of " Bulgarian atrocities," and the like ? Read the history of Ireland as governed by us, and you will there find atro- cities enough to stir your blood. That the Irish people have not been utterly crushed shows they must be made of tough fibre and have an indomitable spirit. It is much to be wished that public meetings may be held and persons competent to the task invited to deliver addresses on Irish history and Irish affairs. This is to be wished, not merely for the purpose of in- structing and arousing our people, but with the practical object of making Irish demands more reasonable than they otherwise might be. This would be the probable result if we made it clear that our sympathies had been stirred. The spirit of hatred on their part would be assuaged, and they would see many things in a dispassionate way. It has been said by some that whatever scheme of Home Rule may be decided on, it should at any rate be the work of our Parliament it must be of our devising. This is exactly contrary to the principles of human nature. If we make the best of schemes, and give it ready-made impose it in fact, upon any set of people is it not an every- day experience that they will be dissatisfied with it ? Let them make their own proposals, not only because they understand their own needs best, but because they will be satisfied with less when allowed a free hand. Recalling the suggestion, that what holds good between man and man should be applied as between nations, it is startling to see how entirely this principle is ignored by those who assert (and their name is Legion) that the Irish are unfit to govern themselves, and must be treated like children. Can there be an instance of more unparalleled imper- tinence ? Does our neighbour ask our leave before he holds the 54 IRELAND. key of his own door ? Is it ours to give or to withhold ? Let English people reflect how they would relish such lan- guage applied to themselves, and they can then realize how astoundingly insolent is its nature. Besides, we are here on the horns of a dilemma. Either the Irish are of a different race from ourselves and therefore not easily amenable to our methods of treatment, or they are of the same blood as the English, in which case they have the same virtues and vices as we have. Coming to the practical question, how far we ought to go in the Home Rule direction, many excellent friends of Ire- land draw the line sharply against absolute separation, and I would speak with great hesitation on a matter so momentous. But it is very seriously to be recollected that the first thing we have to do, the great object of the whole movement, is to satisfy the Irish people as a whole. If they were approached in a right spirit, it is almost certain they would see how much they have to lose by entire separation, and that their general feeling would be against it. But to set up again a standard of direct prohibition might be full of risk. By fixing an arbitrary limit to the field of discussion we should probably give shape to a danger which has no life in it while let alone. The grand point is to remove the hatred of England, which is the irritating cause why separation is hinted at then let things shape themselves without fresh fetters. To remove the " irritating cause " we must of course deal with the landlords. Volumes have been written, and doubtless will continue to be poured forth, as to the difficulties which beset this matter. Of one thing we may rest assured viz., that the old adage says truly, " There can be no omelette without break- ing of eggs." ANNA BATESON. 55 Where a great wrong, which has been done and backed up by us for generations, has to be set right, somebody must suffer. In English society much lamentation is heard over the woes of the Irish landlords, and no doubt they are in a grievous plight. But it is strange to see how society takes to heart the distress of Lord A. or Mrs. B., when it remained compara- tively untouched by the intense wretchedness of the oppressed poor, whose voices went wailing up by thou- sands. The landlords have had their good things, and they should be prepared for vicissitudes in the value of their possessions, as other holders of property have to take their chance of rise and fall. It is expedient that a class shall suffer rather than a people perish. If we feel that we cannot allow all the loss to fall on these unfortunate landownerSj we must make up our minds to bear a part of the burden ourselves. Even supposing that for this cause we were forced to bear an extra tax for some years to come, the money would be better spent than many a million we ungrudgingly pay for wars we might well keep out of. Moreover, a goodly sum would be saved us which we now have to spend on keeping up the military reinforce- ments in* Ireland. What a relief it will be when we get rid of the shame and horror of seeing those reinforcements maintained there ! Visiting Dublin a year or two ago, I felt ashamed to speak with English tongue to the people while one saw the city held, like a foreign fortress, by our soldiers endlessly parad- ing and flaunting our authority in the face of the popula- tion. Travelling about the country one had the chance of 56 IRELAND. hearing expressions of feeling which were too general and too emphatic to be misunderstood. Again, a shame and a horror it was to hear the Govern- ment spoken of as " the English Government," just as the Italians refused thirty years ago to accept the Austrian rule as other than extraneous. Widespread gloom and dissatis- faction were everywhere visible. Amid the lovely scenery of Connemara, and even in Killarney, where English visitors, spending money freely, might help to make our country popular, it was impossible to feel happy or at ease. It is only fair to say that there was a brighter side to the picture in the more loyal tone which appeared to prevail at Queenstown. A part of the Channel Fleet was lying there under the command of the Duke of Edinburgh, and no ill- feeling could be detected. Possibly the pomp and beauty of the noble array ap- pealed to the hearts of the beholders as a thing which was theirs as well as ours ; here we could feel a common pride. The fleet lay there for no purpose of intimidation, and certainly the sight was one which could hardly fail to be appreciated by a glory-loving and imaginative people. " Home Rulers, marm ! They can't show us the aqual of that now," said our boatman with a good-humoured twinkle in his eye. It was with a certain feeling of anxiety that one heard the strains of the National Anthem float upon* the air, played by the band at night; but no groans, no hissings were raised. Truly the Irish care more to be entitled to their own self-respect than they do for a share in the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. But here, in the imperial department, they can share the glory with- out forfeiting their self-respect, and we have an excellent opportunity of attaching them on that side. ANNA BATES ON. 57 The thought occurred to the mind, that Irish lads might be among the handsome well-disciplined young fellows on board those vessels. What a change from their desolate homes on the bogside ! and what a cheering thing to know that they need not feel they had forfeited their birth- right for a mess of pottage, nor sold themselves body and soul, away from their people at home, away from love of country ! We have much to work upon, if we only knew how to apply it ; if we only had the sense to lead these people, whom we cannot drive. Love is better than hate ; union is stronger than schism. But without freedom there can be no love, no strength, no union. The above fragmentary reflections have, I am aware, very little value. At any time but this they could hardly be worth uttering at all. But the Irish Question is in the air; the interest in it is confined to no party. All are beginning to perceive that something must be done, and the words of the humblest may find a hearing if sincerely spoken. Asked at very short notice to give written expression to sentiments which I have held for many years past, I did not feel inclined to shrink from the responsibility. Also the desire is strong within me to express thank- fulness at having lived to see this stir in the public mind. Home Rule ! How one can look back through long years to the time when the mere mention of any such project was the signal for derision ! Fenians were looked upon as the most visionary as well as the wickedest of men. When they threatened to make reprisals, their warnings were ridiculed habitually in the 58 IRELAND. English newspapers, and described as mere brag and bluster. To call these things to mind does one's heart good. It seems as if nothing need be despaired of, as if words of hope need never be empty words, not even when they echo the forlorn old cry of " GOD SAVE IRELAND!" ANNA BATESON. ( 59 ) CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P. HPHE fact that after six months of office the Conservative * Ministry faces Parliament with the resignation both of its Lord Lieutenant and of its Chief Secretary for Ireland, is of the most vital gravity. The condition of Ireland was, as late as November, declared, in nearly every Conservative election speech, to be better under Lord Carnarvon's mild and conciliatory rule than it had ever been under Lord Spencer or his predecessor. In the autumn, Lord Randolph Churchill repeatedly stated that since 1883 crime in Ireland had been steadily diminishing that he was not aware that there was any abnormal distress ; and then in September he told us that after careful and sustained attention he had been unable to detect any sign of any- thing which was likely to occur in Ireland for which the powers of the ordinary law were not sufficient. Now Tory government in Ireland has suddenly utterly collapsed, and the Conservative Lord Lieutenant and his Chief Secretary are both abandoning their posts. The statement that Lord Carnarvon originally took office for a limited period only aggravates the case, for when Lord Salisbury after the election determined to continue in office, he should have at once arranged to fill the Lord Lieutenancy before any public knowledge of the resignation of Lord Carnarvon had agitated and unsettled the public mind. There is not even the pretence made, that Sir W. Hart Dyke's appointment was temporary. The fact is, the Tories have bought the 60 IRELAND. Irish vote at the election by vague promises which they dare not formulate into legislative proposals. Mr. Parnell's friends have, on his express orders, given their votes throughout England for Tories against Radicals, and now the Tories, unable to pay the understood price, cannot cope with the increased and increasing gravity of the crisis in Ireland. The Irish difficulty must be honestly faced and boldly dealt with, and renewal of coercion must not be permitted. Exceptional legislation of a repressive character only per- petuates secret combination for armed and cowardly resist- ance : it does not cure or even lessen the evil, it only compels it to hide. Ireland is entitled to local self-government ; so are Scotland, England, and Wales. It is said that any large and generous measure of self-government for Ireland means separation from Great Britain. It has not meant it in Canada, though the temptations from the United States have often been great. It has not meant it in our Australasian colonies, though the strain has sometimes been severe. It need not mean it it ought not to mean it in Ireland. A grave diffi- culty forearnest peace-loving Radicals is, that we do not know what measure of Home Rule is now asked for by, or would content, the Irish party led by Mr. Parnell. Speeches have been made about the restoration of Grattan's Parliament, modified by the absence of the House of Peers ; but Grattan's Protestant Parliament, with election by limited suffrage, is dead and gone. Mr. Isaac Butt did formulate a scheme, and the English would have been wise if, sixteen years ago, they had met Mr. Butt even more than half-way. Radicals should ask Mr. Parnell to state exactly the ground he takes, and should insist on a clear and speedy answer. Some months ago it was generally supposed that he would have been satisfied with the scheme of local and national councils propounded by Mr. Chamberlain. It is difficult, and it may CHA RLES BRA DLA UGH, M.P. 6 1 be impossible, to get any satisfactory solution of the Irish problem, unless at least there is reasonable frankness on the part of those guiding Irish feeling. Englishmen ought to be very generous in their Irish legislation, for it is un- fortunately too true that much of the enduring discontent amongst all Roman Catholic Irishmen is the result of generations of misgovernment of Ireland in which all English parties are guilty. Irishmen wielding influence should remember that it is the interest of all who love Ireland to close this horrible crisis as rapidly as possible. At present all mercantile enterprise, all agricultural endeavour, is arrested in Ireland by the uncertainty of the future, and the sadness and mischief of the present. The political organizations in Ireland have, since 1879, succeeded, in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, in utterly disorganizing the machinery of government, but the means used are nearly all destructive of future as well as of present well-being. Moonlighting and boycotting have, in one form or another, been present in Ireland for nearly two hundred years they demoralize those who take part in them, those who encourage, those who acquiesce. If Mr. Parnell could convene a purely Irish Parliament in Dublin to-morrow, his task Avould be no easy one even to control those with whom he has secretly worked during the past eight years. I would support the widest measure of self-government in Ireland which did not involve the destruction of the nation of which I am a citizen. I would have Ireland in the United Kingdom what Massachusetts is in the United States. If there is to be a one-chamber Parliament or Council sitting in Ireland, it will of course necessitate, in the statute creating it, provisions in the nature of a Constitution, such as now exists in each State of the American Union, with 62 IRELAND. a Supreme Court created with power to declare the in- validity of any statute exceeding the powers given by the Constitution. What law-making powers do Irishmen seek? There cannot be two supreme Parliaments. How do Irish- men propose to deal with taxation ? What arrangements do they suggest as to apportionment of the National Debt? To what extent do they propose to contribute to the cost of the army and navy ? Do they claim only one Parliament for all Ireland ? or one for the three provinces of Leinster, Connaught, and Munster, and a second for Ulster? If they say the minority in Ulster should give way to the majority in Ireland, why do they contend that the minority in Ireland should not give way to the majority in the United Kingdom ? It is impossible to ignore the intense and active hostility which has hitherto prevailed in Ireland between the Orangemen and Roman Catholics. What reason is there to suppose that under one Dublin Parliament this hostility which has kept bitterly alive since the battle of the Boyne will now die away ? That Mr. Parnell and his friends may do much mischief to their own country and to ours by prolonging the struggle is beyond dispute, but they can do no good to themselves. It is the interest of Englishmen to end a state of things which is a disgrace to civilization, and the effort must be fearlessly and practically made by English Radicals, even if Mr. Parnell will not help us with friendly counsel and kindly hearing. The great leaders of the Liberals, who have for months been discussing this question, should at once state in Parliament the measure they think just. The Radicals are not yet strong enough to carry any great Irish measure by themselves ; but the Whigs and Liberals can do nothing at the next general election if the Radicals be hostile. If Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Chamberlain, and other CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P. 63 men to whom we look for guidance, will now be frank and outspoken, they may save the nation from much misery and dishonour. The best solution would probably be one which would equally give to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, by County Boards and National Councils, the free and full administration of all such of their local affairs as did not involve imperial interests. If, however, this task be too great for immediate enterprise, the Irish question must not wait. Justice must be fully done, and as we do it murder and outrage must be stopped or punished. Irish leaders could stay it somewhat, if they would. At present, I fear, they rather use language which promotes it. Our past has taught them that we have be'en amenable to fear, when we have been deaf to prayer. Surely it is time to end this crime and shame. CHARLES BRADLAUGH. 64 REV. R, ACLAND ARMSTRONG. 'T'HE consideration of the great Irish problem must be dominated by the fact that we have deliberately con- sulted the Irish people. Knowing all that we knew, we deliberately created such a franchise, and so distributed the seats to be filled, that, for the first time in history, the mass of the Irish population should be able to utter their voice in constitutional fashion. This was our own act, and by its result we must abide. The result is this : Sixteen members are sent to Parliament from the Scottish settlement round Lough Neagh to support the Conservative party. Two more Conservatives join them from Dublin University. Every other constituency in Ireland, scornfully ignoring Conservative and Liberal alike, votes Nationalist. Where opposition is ventured, its rout is so overwhelming as only to emphasize the extraordinary unity of the national sentiment. Irish Ireland, by us deliberately consulted, replies with the unanimous demand for Home Rule. To go, with Earl Cowper, behind this fact, and pretend that the national vote means something other than it says, is to make an insidious attack on the fundamental principle of representative institutions. The constitution knows no other mode of ascertaining the wish of the constituencies than to take their vote. The claim is no longer, then, the claim of Mr. Parnell or of a party. It is the claim of Ireland. The behaviour REV. R. ACLAND ARMSTRONG. 65 of any group of men in former Parliaments, the tactics of any politician in the electoral campaign, form no legitimate item in the problem. That problem is how to treat a national demand for the first time authoritatively made. The demand is for Home Rule. It is too late to suggest, with Mr. Trevelyan, departmental boards, by way of edu- cating the people in self-government. Measures which at the right time would have been statesmanlike, may, when the moment is past, be no better than quackery. Such a pro- posal in the late Parliament would have shown political genius ; now it betrays inadequate conception of the situa- tion. Ireland has claimed Home Rule. We may treat that claim thus. We may say that we have made a mistake in continuing to Ireland any share in our parliamentary institutions that she requires for her own sake, or ours, to be governed from above. We may remove her representatives from Westminster, garrison all her towns, and hold her down. There would be a certain statesman- ship in such a course. It would be self-consistent. It would liberate England for the moment from an over- whelming embarrassment ; it would restore order in Ireland. The objections are that it would be a reversal of all our political traditions, that the British electorate would never sanction it, and that it would be incomparably wicked. Our second possible course is to continue to govern Ireland by force while still maintaining constitutional forms. The objection is, that such a political hypocrisy must fail in the future as it has failed in the past must fail more than ever now, because the hypocrisy would be patent instead of veiled. Such a policy must be with or without coercion. If with, the English conscience can know no peace, while Irish intrigue can only be fomented. If without, the anarchy which covers Ireland at the present 66 IRELAND. moment must be chronic. It is easy to expatiate on the dangers and drawbacks involved in any course; it would be difficult to find in any course dangers and drawbacks surpassing those involved in the status quo. Our third possible course is to accord such a measure of Home Rule as shall satisfy the Irish demand. The limits within which such a measure must be framed are, on the one side, free scope for the Irish to manage their own in- ternal affairs ; on the other, the maintenance of the connec- tion with the Crown. It is no business of the British elec- torate to define more particularly than that. It is for the mass of citizens to decree the general direction of a policy in accordance with their views of justice and expediency ; it is for the skilled statesmen whom they employ to construct particular measures embodying the national mandate. The concession of Home Rule, like every other course, has its dangers and its drawbacks ; unlike any other, it is inherently just/and affords hope of a union between England and Ireland not in form, but in fact. It may mean mis- government in Ireland, but cannot mean such serious mis- government as Ireland has received from us. The alterna- tion of concession and coercion is the most demoralizing mode of government practised on this earth. It may mean misgovernment in Ireland ; but do they who think so remem- ber the sobering effect of responsibility on politicians ? It is one thing to behave extravagantly as a member of a small and hated minority in an alien Parliament, another thing to behave extravagantly as a responsible legislator in the Par- liament of one's own country. Many a man votes for that while in a powerless minority which he would never vote for in an effective majority The cry that we have already made concessions enough to Ireland confounds indulgence with justice. Ireland asks no concessions. She asks leave to carry her own burden and REV. R. ACLAND ARMSTRONG. 67 control her own economy. To be free and hungry is better than to be in bonds well-fed. To self-respect" it is no con- solation that the despot means well. No favouritism can compensate a nation for the forfeiture of her autonomy. And what favouritism we have shown to Ireland has been, like all favouritism, capricious. We have invented boons for her; but while the representations of the Scotch members have always been respectfully received and generally acceded to without demur, no such recognition has habit- ually been accorded to the united voice of the Irish members. It is beyond question that if the Irish people sincerely desire to develop their manufactures, their fisheries, their internal communications, their external commerce, an Irish Parliament would carry out that desire with ten times the celerity and not one-tenth of the friction with which the Imperial Parliament will do so. If misunderstandings, jealousies, hatreds between its parts, imperil in any degree the integrity of an empire, if good- will, respect, and sympathy in any degree consolidate it, then the integrity of this British Empire will become incom- parably more secure on the not distant day on which the Irish Parliament is opened on College Green. The legislative union was an experiment : it has failed. The restoration of an Irish legislative chamber will deserve the name of revolution just as much and just as little as its abolition eighty years ago, and by no means so much as the tremendous constitutional changes of the past two sessions. The establishment of Home Rule in Ireland is expedient in the interests of English legislation. No Rules of Procedure can render Parliament an efficient legislative organism, while in its membership it comprises eighty Irishmen burn- ing with a sense of intolerable wrong, and backed by the moral support of a nation. Laws of debate strong enough F 2 68 IRELAND, to suppress them will be strong enough to suppress English liberties as well. The cry for vengeance which too many Liberals have raised against Mr. Parnell can only be gratified by a course which will stifle all that is noblest in the aspira- tions of the Liberalism of Great Britain. Defiance of Ireland means the paralysis of politics in England. Those English- men who make light of the expression of opinion delivered by the Irish people, make light of the spirit of that constitu- tion which is the bulwark of their own freedom. Amid the Babel of political passion and the labyrinth of political intrigue, he will do best who most steadfastly stands by the conviction that the just course is always the wise course ; and that politician will show himself in the present crisis the most sterling statesman who most boldly shapes his measures to the demands of justice. The genius of such a statesman will know how to reconcile the satisfaction of Irish aspiration with the welfare of the whole people of these islands. One such statesman we possess, and for his word we wait. R. ACLAND ARMSTRONG. 69 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT. A /T Y views on the Irish Question have already been made public ; but at a crisis, such as the present is, I am happy to restate them. They are based upon a principle very generally admitted, and whose truth I recognize as of universal application namely, that nations are the best judges of their own affairs, and have an inherent right, subject only to the rights of their neighbours, to self-government. In considering the case of Ireland I have only therefore to ask myself, first, whether the Irish are in fact a nation ; and secondly, whether Home Rule for them would imply a wrong to ourselves. With regard to the first, I have no difficulty in coming to a decision. If history shows anything, it is that the Celtic Irish are as distinct from our Anglo-Norman selves as the Basques are from the Spaniards, the Arabs from the Turks, the Hungarians from the Germans. They have hardly anything in common with us except their language, and even that is an accident of modern date. In their instincts of race, political traditions, and social prejudices, they stand a whole world apart from us ; and on some points they seem to belong to another age and another epoch of development from our own. It is the refusal to understand this that has caused all attempts at fusion, even the most honest, on our part, to fail ; and the past shows 70 IRELAND, nothing in our relations with Ireland but a succession of unwise endeavours to turn Irishmen into Englishmen, alternating with savage outbreaks of disappointment when we have recognised its impossibility. The Celtic Irish, however, though more than once on the point of extinction, have shown a surprising vitality through the past centuries, and have over and over again absorbed their conquerors ; and they are now once more asserting themselves, as dog- gedly bent as ever on following their own way and scorning our conception of their interests. Whatever may be their numerical proportion to the whole population of the island, it is certain that they have imbued five-sixths of it with their ideas and hopes and political aspirations, and that they stand out distinctly as united in their demand for Home Rule. Moreover, it is abundantly evident that the Irish problem of to-day is not in its nature different from what it has always been. We have to choose for the twentieth time between withdrawing our garrison and effecting a re-conquest. There is no middle course. For myself, of course, I cannot doubt which is the policy which justice bids us pursue. I cannot see that we have any business with re-conquest, and I am clear that for Ireland her own way is best. We owe, however, doubtless and this is the second point a duty to ourselves in the matter which we cannot overlook. Our connection with Ireland is a fact of seven centuries' standing, and cannot lightly be broken. If it were true, as some pretend, that Home Rule there would ruin us commercially, or expose us to foreign invasion, we should be obliged to dare even injustice in our self- defence. But I confess I see no such danger. It seems to me a wholly false analogy to compare our position towards Ireland with that of America towards the WILFRID SCA WEN BL UNT. 7 1 Southern States. The Southern States, had they established their independence, would have forced the American Republic into an attitude of permanent armed defence on the Western Continent which they were justified in refusing. But with us the sole military effect of such Home Rule as the Irish now demand would be to release us in war time from the embarrassment of occupying a disaffected province always ready to hail an invader. A great deal of nonsense is talked about Ireland being too close to our shores to admit of any risks of attack from that quarter. But people seem to forget that we have lived for centuries quite as close to France, and that Ireland is far more likely to invite our enemies now to help her than she would be to join in an attack if we gave her what she asked. The Irish are not a maritime nation, and, separated by the sea, never could be a danger to us, were they ever so ill-disposed. The danger is, in our present position, of holding them down by force on their own ground. There remains the danger to our pockets, and this is a matter for economists to consider. But I should be much sur- prised if it would be possible for the Irish, by any imposition of import duties or otherwise, to do our trade as much harm as the insecurity due to the present quarrel is causing it. Ireland is commercially dependent on us far more than we are on Ireland, and so would remain. The only point I recognize as a serious difficulty is that of the property held by Englishmen in Ireland. Engagements no doubt have been entered into by the Imperial Government toward the holders of Irish land and those who have invested money there on mortgage. This seems to me an imperial obliga- tion, and if there is loss, imperial funds should, in my opinion, be held responsible. But I consider the danger of 72 IRELAND. confiscation enormously exaggerated ; and I do not conceive that an Irish more than any other Government would sepa- rate itself from that on which all Governments rely for strength the interests of property. My best advice to Irish landlords would be that they should take their part in the general political movement of the country, and so retain their control over it. I believe that were they to do so, they would be well able to hold their own under Home Rule. Let Ireland then have what she demands, self-govern- ment ; she does not ask for separation from the Crown ; and I am confident that neither in purse nor in political strength would England be any poorer. She would regain, on the contrary, her freedom of action, and relieve herself before the world of the stigma of a long oppression which has become a scandal, and a hindrance alike to her moral and material progress. It will be observed that I pay little heed to the conten- tion, now commonly raised, that the Irish people are under compulsion from their leaders when they demand Home Rule. This cry is always raised when nations begin to ask for anything unpalatable to their rulers ; and my experience in Egypt and elsewhere has taught me to be profoundly sceptical of the argument that a people can be terrorized by their own chosen representatives, or by secret societies of their own founding to their own prejudice. A certain class there is, and a certain section of the inhabitants of Ireland, who see their interest in maintaining the Union on its present basis. But the immense mass of the Irish are enthusiastically against it. I know also too well how unscrupulously public opinion in England is worked up through the press, where- ever material interests are involved, or supposed to be in- volved. The power of money is nowhere more apparent WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT. 73 than in questions of this sort; and there is every probability that the English people will be deceived on the Irish as they have been on the Egyptian and Indian questions by those whose immediate financial interests lie in distorting the truth. Only, there will some day be a rude awakening. These are the cases that make one despair of popular government as compatible with empire. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT. ( 74 ) A. I. TILLYARD, M.A. CAMB. '"THE Home Rule question will before long have to be decided by the direct vote of the English people. On that vote will hang issues more tremendous than have hung on any previous exercise of the franchise. Woe, then, to our country if her electors have a wrong opinion or no opinion in this matter. But how are ordinary people to come to a conclusion in a matter that baffles statesmen and divides parties ? We of the rank and file, if I may speak as one of them, need not pretend to have mastered all the sad facts of Ireland's history, to understand thoroughly the inner life and conflicting interests of its divided people, or to pronounce authoritatively on every detail of a Home Rule scheme ; but only to be alive to certain great facts, which they who run may read. In the first place, the Empire is dismembered already. It is the Disunited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and always has been. Separation itself could scarce make things worse. Ireland laughs when we have distress at home or disaster abroad. The greater Ireland in the United States and the Colonies acts in concert with the forces of disaffection at our gates. There is more union between us and our self-governing Colonies, there is more union between us and the separate people of the United States, than between us and Ireland. The problem is how to substitute moral union for force union, and so establish for the first time the unity of the Empire. A. L TILLYARD, M.A. 75 Moral union can only be brought about by legislating in accordance with the wishes of the Irish people. The Irish demand is for self-government a demand that, uncompli- cated by other issues, naturally appeals to every Liberal. Why should not the Irish govern themselves ? Because the Irish people are not to be trusted. Every argument against Home Rule comes back to this. But distrust of the people .is Toryism ; trust in the people is Liberalism. Tangled as are the details of the Irish problem, never was there a simpler or a clearer case of principle. I for one elect to stand to my principles, and to trust the Irish people. Let us as a nation say to our Irish brethren : " Here are the destinies of Ireland for you to make or mar." Surely the answer will be : " We will make them, not mar them." What does distrusting the Irish people imply ? It implies that the leading men of Ireland, the home of the most passionate devotion to country, are ignorant of the very meaning of the word patriotism, that they would sacrifice everything at home to cupidity and religious intolerance, and everything abroad, to spite England. Cms credam. Our own experience ought to keep us from arguing what men will do when they are responsible, from what they do when they are irresponsible. It is a commonplace of politics that office makes Liberals turn Conservative, and Conservatives turn Liberal so great is the difference between a responsible Government and an irresponsible Opposition. The case is much stronger with regard to the Nationalists. Make them responsible for the welfare of Ireland, and the tactics adopted to wring consent from an unwilling Government would be changed for efforts used to restore prosperity to a country impoverished by centuries of misgovernment and oppression, and torn by internal conflict. Human nature is the same on both sides of the ;6 IRELAND. Irish Sea. Mistrust has brought out its worst character- istics ; faith will bring out its best. This argument does not apply to measures of half-trust. A half measure of local government would be dangerous. It would bring but a limited sense of responsibility, and leave national aspirations ungratified. Local institutions would be worked, not for their proper ends, but to obtain larger concessions. Tinkering legislation has been our bane, long enough. We must trust the Irish people " not at all, or all in all." Some are frightened at the threats of the Orange Party (who are a portion only of Irish Protestants), that they will bring about civil war rather than tolerate Home Rule. These threats were heard before, and came to nothing. An alternative policy has already been declared by some Orange- men. They will either fight or leave the country. The pro- babilities are, they will do neither. Liberals will hardly care to follow a policy toward Ireland dictated by the party whose watchword is the supremacy of the few over the many, and brute force to back it up. Yet between this policy of coercion and the policy of conciliation, pure and simple, there will be found to be no logical halting-place. England and Ireland are necessary to each other, and were designed by Nature to be friends. Paradoxical as it may appear, to loosen the present bonds in the spirit of confidence and goodwill, is to tie the sister isle fast to us for evermore. A. I. TILLYARD. ( 77 ) J. O'CONNOR POWER. T HAVE been for many years a consistent supporter of a * federal union between Great Britain and Ireland, and during the eleven years that I sat in the House of Commons as the representative of an Irish county I never lost an opportunity of stating my views upon the subject. What I am now about to say will be only a brief summary of what I have already published by speech and writing. One great advantage to be gained by Irish self-government is constantly overlooked. The Irish representatives sitting in Dublin would have to answer to the Irish people for the acts of their own Government. The Irish Government would have an Irish Opposition to encounter, and the dis- affection which is now visited upon the British Cabinet would be directed by Irishmen against their native rulers. Make the Irish leaders responsible, and you take away at once one-half of their power with their own countrymen, and you deprive them at the same time, and in a still greater degree, of the power of annoying or injuring you. The schemes for self-government in Ireland which have been proposed for our acceptance are of almost every form and variety known to civilized states. Not only have we different proposals from different sets of politicians, but we have different proposals from politicians in the same set. " Grattan's Parliament," " Ireland like Canada," " National Councils," "Grand Committees composed exclusively of Irish members," and other phrases, have been used to indi- 78 IRELAND. cate a plan or promote a policy ; but self-government on the basis of a federal union seems to me to be the only practicable scheme of the many which have been proposed. Under Grattan's Parliament there was no Irish Administra- tion responsible to Irish opinion. The Irish Government consisted of the Viceroy and his secretary and their subor- dinates. They went into and out of office with the English Government, and were independent of any vote of the Irish Legislature. As for the Canadian example, it must be remembered that the only visible bond connecting Canada with Great Britain is the Governor-Generalship. Canada consents to accept her chief ruler from London, providing for him an establishment at Ottawa and a salary of 50,000 dollars a year. He acts on the advice of his Canadian Ministers, and in exchange for this slight acknowledgment of her dependence Canada enjoys the protection of the British arms. Of course, like the other colonies, she leaves to the Imperial Parliament all questions of foreign policy, but possesses commercial freedom and full power over her own tariffs and revenues, besides the power to raise militia and volunteers. If Ireland were as far away from England as Canada, the latter might well serve as a model for a new Irish Constitution ; but as she is within four hours' sail of Holyhead, this solution of the Anglo-Irish problem will, I think, be dismissed as impracticable. The federal scheme was adopted at a Home Rule Conference held in Dublin in 1873, when Mr. Butt was the leader of the Irish party, and fifty-nine Irish members were returned to Parliament in the following year to support it. It has undergone one impor- tant modification since ; whereas it was intended originally to restore the Irish House of Lords, it is now proposed to copy the United States model, and substitute an elective Senate for the Irish Second Chamber. If Ireland held a position similar to that of a State in the American Union, /. O'CONNOR POWER. 79 her internal affairs would be regulated by an Irish Parlia- ment. Imperial affairs everything relating to the colonies, the relations of the Empire with foreign States, the disposi- tion of the naval and military forces, the levying of imperial taxes for imperial purposes, and the issues of peace and war would be regulated, as at present, by the Imperial Par- liament, in which Ireland would be represented when im- perial affairs only were under consideration. Ireland had no representation in the Imperial Parliament prior to the Union, but the power she possessed of influencing British policy was of a much more dangerous character ; for, having absolute control of her own finance, she had the power to withhold supplies in time of war. In a federal arrangement the prerogatives of the Crown would remain untouched ; Great Britain and Ireland would each transact its own busi- ness in its own way; while for all imperial purposes the two countries would continue to be one imperial State. I do not believe that the relations between Austria and Hungary, or those between Norway and Sweden, are examples to be followed. They carry us farther in the direction of decen- tralization than is at all necessary for the purposes of self- government ; I mean such self-government as is at all ad- missible self-government which is compatible with the integrity of the United Kingdom. Among foreign nations the United States supplies the highest example of local self- government combined with imperial unity. There are thirty-eight Home Rule Parliaments for the thirty-eight States of the Union, and one Imperial Parliament at Wash- ington, whose authority in all imperial affairs is unques- tioned and unquestionable. Scarcely a single writer has dealt with the Irish question recently without making some reference to the American Union, and those who have written most strongly against any form of Home Rule in Ireland have referred to the determination with which the So IRELAND. North put down the rebellion of the South, and sacrificed everything for the Union, as an illustration of what England is prepared to do in order to preserve the union with Ireland. But there is some confusion of ideas and inconsistency of reasoning in this appeal to the conduct of the United States. The North put down the rebellion of the Southern States in 1865, as England did the Irish rebellion in 1798; but the North did not destroy the legislative independence of the Southern rebels, as England did that of the Irish ones ; and if we are to imitate the North in her determination to main- tain the Union, we must not be surprised if we are called upon to imitate her also in her recognition of States' rights and local freedom. There is no necessity, however, to go outside the limits of the Empire for an example, whenever the state of public feeling in Ireland admits of this grave question being considered on its merits with a view to a final settlement. The Act of Confederation, combining the British North American provinces under the title of the Dominion of Canada, and the debates which took place in the Canadian Parliament, throw a good deal of light on the subject. The question How are you to define what affairs are Irish and what are imperial ? is here answered very clearly. The powers of the provincial Parliaments are strictly and clearly defined, as well as those of the Dominion Parlia- ment at Ottawa, and no serious difficulty has arisen in the working of the system since it was established in 1867. Some of the oldest and most experienced politicians in Canada prophesied all manner of civil strife in the working of the Confederation Act, but their dismal forebodings have never come to pass. The strongest objection to a federal arrangement which I have seen stated is that it leaves the Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament as it is now, and that in imperial affairs, though not in English and Scotch /. O'CONNOR POWER. 81 affairs, the Irish members would still have the power of disturbing the proceedings of the Legislature and coercing the Government of the day. I maintain, on the contrary, that they would not have this power, and that if they had, they would have no sufficient motive for exercising it. The Irish members returned to the Imperial Parliament after the establishment of Home Rule would represent, not one party, but two the Irish Government and the Irish Opposi- tion. They would carry their differences with them to London, just as Republicans and Democrats from New York or California carry their differences to Washington. It is feared that they might combine to extort a further measure of independence for the Irish Parliament ; but if such a thing were attempted, it should be treated as a breach of faith and of the understanding on which alone any scheme of Home Rule could be sanctioned, and, so treated, it would be easily disposed of. To prevent the Imperial Parliament from being made an arena of conflict on the interpretation of the limits of its own powers and those of the local Parliament, I would amalga- mate the Privy Councils of the United Kingdom, and erect them into a Supreme Court of Appeal for the settlement of all disputed questions arising between the local and imperial authority. The English Privy Council performs these func- tions at present in respect of provincial and dominion authority in Canada. The powers of such a court would, I am convinced, be very rarely invoked or exercised, and they would be limited strictly to the duty of judicial inter- pretation. It would have no power to interfere in any way with Irish legislation within its own proper limits, such as the English Privy Council had in the last century ; and it would be above the control and beyond the influence of the Government of the day. Where, then, would be the motive for Irish obstruction in the Imperial Parliament ? If the 82 IRELAND. Irish members made any demand for grants of imperial money, they would be told plainly that they must rely on their own resources, of which they would have absolute control, subject to the payment of Ireland's quota to imperial expenditure. In the course of time the Irish members would divide themselves into Liberals and Con- servatives, like the English and Scotch members, and so contribute according to their party predilections to the regular and orderly government of a united empire. It may be taken for granted that if the Privy Council were entrusted with the duties here assigned to it, it would be reconstituted in such a way as to admit within its ranks the best legal talent and the highest political ability in the three kingdoms. If it be suggested that Ireland would not be satisfied with such 'a court of appeal because her Privy Councillors would necessarily be in a minority as compared with those of Great Britain, it must be answered that the integrity of the United Kingdom must at all hazards be preserved, and that if Ireland is to enjoy legislative inde- pendence within the Empire she must submit to effective imperial control. I look upon it as an essential condition of any settlement of the Irish national question, that whatever is done should be the result of open and avowed agreement between the representatives of Great Britain on the one hand and those of Ireland on the other. Better not to touch the question at all unless it can be dealt with finally. Whatever is cheerfully conceded on one side should be as cheerfully accepted on the other not as an instalment, but as a settle- ment. Then, next to the paramount necessity for preserving the unity of the Empire is the indispensable condition that the minority shall, while justly deprived of the power of ruling the majority, have the fullest guarantees against per- secution or oppression ; and the powers to be conferred on /. O'CONNOR POWER. 83 an Irish Legislature must be consistent with the primary conditions of civilized society in this age, the enforcement of law and order, the security of property, and the main- tenance of religious liberty. The existing system, it must be admitted, fails to give the minority the protection which they demand, because in the nature of things it is impos- sible. If they had not accustomed themselves to rely on British bayonets they would have made a better use of their own resources ; if they had not been pampered in ascen- dency they would have long since learnt how to live on terms of equality with the rest of their fellow-countrymen ; if they had not grossly neglected the duties of property, they would not now be engaged in a desperate struggle to main- tain its rights ; and if even now they had wit enough to perceive and sense enough to embrace a great opportunity, they might obtain better terms from their own countrymen than the Imperial Parliament can secure for them. The minority in Ireland can do far more for themselves when thrown on their own resources than any exterior power can do for them. Home Rule or no Home Rule, the Imperial Parliament should never surrender the right, in the last resort, to put down disorder and prevent civil war. It should retain the power, which the United States Government has, of sending the military forces of the Central Government into any State where the local forces are unable or unwilling to preserve order. And if the expenses of the expedition were levied on the area of the disturbance, it would be a just penalty for the violation of the public peace. But the minority should not be looking perpetually to the British Government for help ; it should rely on its own courage and resolution, and not absolutely despise those arts of con- ciliation which minorities in every country have to exercise in order to live in haimony with those around them. If the Irish police should be confined to those purely civil duties 84 IRELAND. which they discharge in England and Scotland, I see no danger in leaving the control of them in Irish hands. Under any system of representative county 'government, such as we expect to see established before long, the police in every part of the United Kingdom will come under the control of the new county authorities, and nothing better could happen in Ireland than that the Royal Irish Constabulary should cease to be a national force, and become a purely local force, for local purposes, under local management and control. By reserving the organization of the militia and volunteers, as well as the army and navy, to imperial authority, the Irish Government would have nothing whatever to do with an armed force, and would be deprived of the means of physical resistance to the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament, should, unhappily, any conflict arise between them. As to the detection of crime, I cannot doubt that the instinct of self-preservation alone would be sufficient to induce the local authorities in Irish counties to take adequate measures to that end ; and I am convinced that their sense of responsibility would change entirely their present attitude of indifference into one of active sympathy with all the processes of the criminal law. No one proposes, as far as I know, to interfere with or remove the present occupants of the Bench, either at Petty Sessions or Quarter Sessions, or in the Superior Courts ; and the judicial administration of the law would therefore remain for many years in the hands of those to whom it is now entrusted. The struggle for the possession of the soil in Ireland is as old as the English occupation, and in its present aspect it is one of the great difficulties in the way of a satisfactory solution of the national question. The Land Act of 1881 is one of the greatest measures of justice ever placed upon any statute-book, and it will remain for all time a noble monument of the statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone, and of /. O'CONNOR POWER. 85 his unrivalled power as a legislator. That it has not solved all the difficulties of Irish land tenure is a testimony to the desperate character of the evils which it was designed to remove, and shows that, independently of agrarian agitation, there are economic causes at work which make it impossible that any solution should be final which does not combine ownership with occupation. Landlordism has broken down utterly and irretrievably in Ireland, and it is on the decline in every part of the United Kingdom. The pressure of economic forces is diminishing the power of landlordism in Great Britain, as the pressure of political forces has dimin- ished it in Ireland; and when the British taxpayer is invited to buy out the Irish landlord, he may think twice before consenting to do anything of the kind. The Irish landlord is now very anxious to sell, as nobody in Ireland wants to buy. He appeals to England, and hopes to ex- tract from her sympathy or necessity that which, on the ground of justice alone, he has no right to demand. If, however, it be apprehended that under Home Rule the tenants would refuse to pay their rents, and combine to confiscate the property of their landlords, the latter have a right to insist on guarantees from the Irish Government against such injustice ; and as the British Government is not likely to assume the burden of ownership itself, even for a limited time, I know of no more equitable and effective arrangement than that which would make the Irish Government responsible for the fulfilment of con- tracts, by enabling the landlord, in every case where judicial rents were not paid, to sell his interest to that Government, on terms to be determined by the Land Commission or one of the superior courts of justice. The influence of the Irish Government would then be exercised on the side of contracts, lest it should be called upon to take the place of the landlord. 86 IRELAND. As to religious liberty, I have no apprehension that it would be endangered by the concession of self-government to Ireland. Religious persecution, of which Irish Catholics have had their share, is a powerful teacher of the virtue of religious toleration, and I have no doubt that the Protestant minority in Ireland would be as safe under Home Rule as the Catholic minority is in England under the Imperial Parliament. Certainly it would have a much larger pro- portionate representation in the Irish Parliament than the Catholics of Great Britain have at Westminster. The Irish Catholic constituencies have in a great many cases returned Catholics to represent them, and in my experience of Irish elections I have never known a single instance in a Catholic constituency where a candidate otherwise accept- able was opposed on the ground of his religious belief. The time has gone by, it is to be hoped, on both sides of the Channel, when considerations of this kind could in- fluence the choice of a representative to serve in the Legislature, where members of all classes and creeds meet on a footing of equality, and where, according to the theory of our constitution, each is a representative not merely for his own constituency, but for the nation at large. O'Connell used to say that he was willing to take his theology from Rome, but not his politics. Besides, there exists among the Catholic laity a feeling which resents any- thing in the shape of clerical dictation in matters political ; and in an Irish Parliament this feeling would assert itself on the slightest provocation. Any proposal to impose dis- abilities on the Protestant minority would, I am convinced, be voted down by a large majority of the Catholic members. The world has grown too wise for bigotry and intolerance ; and the persecution of opinion is no longer regarded as a means of conversion, but as one of the surest agencies to render conversion impossible. The Imperial Parliament /. O'CONNOR POWER. 87 will reserve to itself, as the United States Congress at Washington does, the duty of guarding freedom of con- science. No State of the American Union may pass any law depriving any citizen of the United States of his civil rights on account of his religion. Our legislation for the last three-quarters of a century has been largely occupied in removing privileges and distinctions set up in a less en- lightened age for the benefit of particular classes and creeds, and it is not tolerable, nor even conceivable, that any part of the United Kingdom should ever again be allowed to revert to the expedients which have been thus discredited and repudiated. It is said that federalism is a system devised for securing cohesion among States, and that it is not applicable where your object is decentralization ; but this argument cuts both ways, for it shows that federalism was applicable at the time of the Union, and if a blunder was committed then in not adopting it as can, I think, easily be shown there is no good reason why that blunder should not be repaired. If the Act of 1800 had effected a real and solid union, the case would be very different from what it is ; but, as a matter of fact, the problem with which Pitt had to deal still remains to be solved. It cannot be denied that the powers exercised by Grattan's Parliament were incompatible with imperial authority, but what was needed was, not the destruction of the Parliament, but the modification of its powers. Federalism combines all the advantages of union and excludes all the dangers of separation, while at the same time it makes Irish freedom secure, and maintains the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament. J. O'CONNOR POWER. REV. T. J. LAWRENCE, OF DOWNING COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; VICAR OF LUDLOW. A LARGE section of the British public is suffering from a bad attack of political hysterics. Sturdy Liberals are forgetting the first principles of Liberalism; great authors are shrieking against the proposals they themselves advocated in wiser and soberer moments ; learned judges are leaving the calm of the bench and descending into the political arena as gladiators of the most pugnacious type ; respectable peers are positively foaming at the mouth with vituperative rage ; Clubdom is up in arms ; and the Times, in full accoutrement of feathers, paint, and tomahawk, has gone on the war path, a fearful and wonderful spectacle to behold. What is it all about? Separation, dismember- ment of the Empire, paltering with treason, surrender to dynamite, mad and wicked ambition all these and a host of similar cries are heard amid the turmoil. No two persons agree as to the exact nature of the terrible evil with which we are threatened, but all assert that it is something very dreadful indeed. And the remedy is as mysterious as the disease. It must of course be drastic. We are just now in the mood for heroics. Something short, sharp, and decisive is wanted. If we only hit hard enough, all will be well. It is true we have not yet settled who we are to hit, or where our blow is to be planted, or with what sort of weapon it is to be inflicted. But these are unimportant details. The great thing is to make somebody feel. That done, the unknown disease of the body politic will imme- REV. T. J. LAWRENCE. 89 diately be cured, and we shall go on our majestic way rejoicing in having given to the world a new proof of the vast wisdom which we invariably show in managing our Irish affairs. Such at least is the opinion of the profound political thinkers who spend most of their time lounging in the clubs of Pall Mall, and the omniscient gentlemen who write the editorials of the London Press. What the new democracy thinks is not so evident. I shall be very much surprised if it should turn out that the workers in field and forge and factory share the panic of their self-appointed instructors. Let us try to look calmly at the situation in Ireland, with- out being swayed in one direction by unmanly panic, or in the other by foolish optimism. The first thing to notice is that the problem which confronts us, terribly complicated though it be, is less dark and confused than it was a short time ago. We now know what Ireland really wants. For the first time in history the voice of the Irish people has been heard speaking in a perfectly unmistakable and at the same time perfectly lawful and constitutional manner. Household suffrage has made the country articulate. Pre- viously we knew what were the wishes of selected classes ; now we know what the whole nation desires. And whereas in former days the representatives of Irish constituencies were of all shades of political opinion, from Orange Tories to Republican Sepaiatists, and no one shade had any marked preponderance ; now there are but two parties among them, and of these one is so much stronger than the other that it may be considered for all practical purposes as the people of Ireland. We may dismiss with the contempt they deserve the ingenious attempts that have been made to prove that, though 85 Irish members out of 103 are followers of Mr. Parnell, yet in reality he has but a bare majority of the Irish people at his back. The thousands upon thousands of so- QO IRELAND. called loyalists, who could not muster sufficient courage to record a secret vote in defence of all they hold dear, are as purely imaginary as FalstafFs men in buckram. Nor is the theory that a few daring spirits terrorized their neighbours into voting as one man for Home Rule candidates worthy of much consideration. Such explanations of opposition are the commonplaces of tyranny. Either foreign emissaries or domestic traitors have invariably misled a too-confiding people, who, if only they were left to themselves, would live in happiness under a paternal rule. So reasoned the Sultan when Bulgaria revolted in 1876. So reasoned the Czar when Poland rose in 1863. So reasoned Charles I. when the Eng- lish people refused to pay his unconstitutional exactions. And so reason our would-be terrorists of to-day. We have heard it all before not so very long ago, and believed it too, till we learned by sad experience how false it was. In 1881 Mr. Forster told us that power to lock up the " village ruffians," who were at the bottom of all outrages, would enable him to rule Ireland in peace. He got the power ; and he used it till the prisons overflowed with his suspects. And the result was a general revolt against all law and order on the part of the population that was supposed to be so docile, while a very considerable proportion of the men who were then sent to gaol have been elected by their neighbours to represent them in the present Parliament. Turn and twist the matter as we may, there is no escape from the fact that we are confronted by a demand for Home Rule from three- quarters of the Irish people, including half the population of Ulster. It is a gain to know what Ireland wants ; and instead of trying all sorts of futile devices to persuade ourselves that she does not mean what she says, it will be wise to sit down calmly and see if we cannot meet her wishes in such a way as to content her, without giving up anything that we hold REV. T. J. LAWRENCE. 91 essential to the security of the Empire. Surely we have had enough of blunt refusals, followed first by stern coercion and then by humiliating concessions. To go back no further than the present century, the long denial of the full rights of citizenship to Roman Catholics was followed by the surrender of 1829, which was forced from the Tory Govern- ment of the day in order to avoid civil war. And again, the refusal to concede anything to the Tenant Right move- ment of 1850 led to the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. We are told that Home Rule means separation and dismember- ment of the Empire. If it does, I make bold to say that England will never grant it ; but a very little knowledge of the political constitutions of civilized states is sufficient to show that wide rights of local and even national self-govern- ment are quite compatible with imperial unity. Our glib instructors, whose indignant patriotism fills the correspon- dence columns of the Times with burning denunciations of the Home Rule project, are wonderfully ignorant of a whole class of important facts which it behoves them to study carefully at the present juncture. Austria is a bundle of nationalities, all of whom have assemblies of their own to manage their local affairs. Germany is a great con- federation. Even Russia allows Finland to retain its ancient Parliament. The world bristles with instances of subordinate and local councils, ranging in power and attri- butes from parochial vestries to national Parliaments. Surely somewhere along the extended line can be found an assembly fitted to be the type of a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin. It is not so very long ago since Lord Salisbury in his Newport speech directed our attention to the relations between Austria and Hungary. Our " men of light and leading " are far more likely to find a solution of the Irish difficulty in the study of the constitutional expedients by which similar difficulties have been overcome 92 IRELAND. elsewhere, than by shrieking themselves hoarse with impo- tent denunciations of Mr. Parnell and his followers. The statesmen of England are not so far inferior to those of other countries as to be baffled by problems which have been solved with more or less completeness by some of the leading nations of the world. Our own kindred beyond the Atlantic have reconciled complete local self-government with absolute external unity. Taking as the basis of nego- tation the position of a State in the American Union, we might be able to come to an agreement with the Irish leaders which would satisfy the reasonable aspirations of Ireland, while it retained unimpaired imperial sovereignty in imperial affairs. But it will be said that in Ireland the political problem is only one branch of the difficulty. An agrarian revolution is in full swing, and we cannot surrender the landlords to be dealt with as may seem good to an Irish Parliament. Undoubtedly there is much force in this contention. Though as a class the Irish landowners are deserving of very little sympathy, yet seeing that England has in times gone by placed them and maintained them in the country as a bulwark of her own rule, it would be dishonourable in her now to leave them to the tender mercies of a nation demoralized by their oppressions, and only too ready to put in practice the lessons of dishonesty in agrarian matters which were taught by English law during the time it allowed the owners of the soil to confiscate the improvements of their tenants. But the scheme of expropriation recently made public by Mr. Giffen solves this difficulty in the most effective manner, while at the same time it enlists on the side of honesty the very men whose influence is now too often used in favour of a very loose interpretation of the Eighth Commandment. If Great Britain bought out the landlords at a reasonable REV. T. J. LA WRENCE. 93 price, and handed over the rent of the land to the new local Irish government in lieu of those expenses of administration which she now bears, we may be perfectly certain Mr. Parnell and his lieutenants would find means to get in the revenue thus assigned to them, and that the Irish peasants would cheerfully pay to rulers of their own choice a land tax which will be spent on objects they approve, especially as the tax is to be considerably less than their present rent. And if the worst comes to the worst, and John Bull loses some of his cash in the process of pacifying Ireland, he must be content to suffer in pocket for his past misdeeds. A pecuniary loss which closes the era of repression and hatred will in reality be great gain. If once the land question is satisfactorily settled, I believe that the pacification of Ireland under some scheme of Home Rule will not be a task of insuperable difficulty. We need not take seriously the threats of the so-called loyalists, who show their loyalty by threatening to kick the Queen's crown into the Boyne, and line with rifles every ditch in Ulster, if their position of ascendency is touched. The same wild words were spoken when the Disestablishment of the Irish Church was mooted, but the fire-eaters never ventured upon action. They are contemptible in numbers and intelligence ; and assuredly the sturdy common-sense of Irish Protestantism would never countenance a policy of rebellion. Mr. Parnell himself is a Protestant, as Swift and Grattan and Plunkett were before him. If Protestants cordially accept the new order of things, they will have nothing to fear. The old monopoly of office and emolument will indeed disappear ; but in its stead will arise an ascendency based upon culture, capacity, and popular sympathy, and in all these, Protestants need be at no disadvantage compared with their Roman Catholic fellow-citizens. 94 IRELAND. The only alternative to Home Rule is coercion of the sternest kind. The present state of things is admitted on all hands to be intolerable. Somehow or other we must make the law obeyed, and there are only two ways of attaining so desirable an end. England, being far more powerful than Ireland, can drive, drill, dragoon, and shoot the Irish people, till they submit to whatever laws she chooses to impose upon them. Only she must continue the process from year to year, and from generation to generation. She must be hard and ruthless, not by fits and starts, but always and on every occasion. She must abolish the farce of parliamentary representation, and tell the Irish people that for the future she intends to rule them without regard to their wishes. She must find a Strafford or a Cromwell, and set him over them with dictatorial power. His behests must be law, and an irresistible force must be at his disposal to compel obedience to them. This is one alternative. The other is to enlist the people on the side of order by conceding to them a Government which they approve, administered by leaders of their own choice. Half- measures are ridiculous and impossible. What, for instance, would come of giving county govern- ment, except that there would soon be thirty-two local assemblies in Ireland, all, or nearly all, devoted to Mr. Parnell, and determined to make decent administration impossible till Home Rule was granted ? The people of England will not be content for long to rule Ireland by the sword. In a fit of irritation and panic they may consent to try the experiment ; but better feelings will soon arise, and one party or the other will find its advantage in proposing concession. And if we are to concede, why should we not do so at once, without wasting the time and energy of Parliament on a new Coercion Bill, and laying up a fresh store of hatred against England in the REV. T.J. LAWRENCE. 95 breasts of the Irish people ? Statesmen must decide whether Home Rule is to be granted by the present Parliament. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to recall, and apply to the present crisis, the warning addressed by Brougham to the House of Lords on the night when it threw out Earl Grey's Reform Bill : " As sure as man is mortal and to err is human, justice deferred enhances the price at which you must purchase safety and peace ; nor can you expect to gather in another crop than they did who went before you, if you persist in their utterly abominable husbandry of sowing injustice and reaping rebellion." T. J. LAWRENCE. T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. "\7i 7E impeach the Act of Union as the cause of enor- * mous evil to England and to Ireland ; and we demand its repeal or its modification. First, we demand it because our experience of a par- tially independent Parliament was encouraging, and our experience of a united Parliament is disastrous. The Par- liament of the ante-Union days was most defective. The members of but one creed, and that the creed of the smallest numbers, were admissible within its walls. The House of Lords was hopelessly and almost entirely servile and corrupt ; and of the three hundred members of the House of Commons above two hundred were returned by individuals, from forty to fifty were returned by ten persons ; several of the boroughs had no resident at all; two-thirds of the entire number were returned by less than one hundred persons ; and one hundred had places or pensions. Yet that body advanced, according to the confession of one of its destroyers Fitz-Gibbon, Lord Clare the material prosperity of Ireland with extraordinary rapidity. Created in the narrowest spirit of bigotry, it showed a most liberal spirit ; its destruction marked an enormous aggravation in the sectarian spirit of Ireland. In 1 778 the purely Protestant Parliament restored Catholics to the equal enjoyment of all property they held, and enabled them to acquire long terms for years in lands. In 1782 the Protestant Parliament restored to the Catholics the right to acquire freehold T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 97 property; in 1792 and 1793 the learned professions were opened to a certain extent to Catholics ; in 1793 the elective franchise was restored to the Catholics by the Protestant Parliament ;* and finally with regard to the old Irish Parlia- ment its destruction was admittedly obtained by means as foul as any recorded in English history. The demand for the restoration of our Parliament, among other things, is denounced as a demand involving a revolu- tionary innovation. But, as everybody knows, there was an Irish Parliament for centuries, and its destruction took place but eighty-five years ago. To demand a return to a state of relations that existed for centuries, and that only ceased to exist less than a century ago, cannot be called, except by an abuse of terms, a demand for a revolutionary innovation. Then our methods are described as revolutionary. But we make the demand in the name of 85 representatives out of an entire representation of 103 members. We make it in the Imperial Parliament. It would be hard to put forward a demand in a form more constitutional. How an Englishman, who believes in countries being governed in accordance with the wishes of their peoples, can oppose the claim for Home Rule thus put forward by the Irish people, is very hard to understand. But is the demand wise or well-founded ? We have had eighty-five years' experience of the Act of Union. From almost the hour of its birth more, from the hour of its con- templation the Act of Union created disloyalty in Ireland and discomfort in England. Pitt looked forward to the Union many years before it was proposed. " The standing object," writes Lecky, " of his later Irish policy was to cor- rupt and to degrade, in order that he might ultimately de- * O'Connell, quoted by J. G. S. MacNeill : "The Irish Parliament," pp. 96-5. H 98 IRELAND. stroy, the Legislature of "the country." * It was Pitt's refusal of parliamentary reform that transformed the United Irish- men from loyal reformers into revolutionaries ; f and it was Pitt's recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, with the same purpose of carrying the Union, that brought about the rebellion of '98. The united Parliament had scarcely begun to sit when it had to pass Coercion Acts for Ireland. Coercion is the clumsy and fatal instrument by which Governments seek to per- petuate themselves over unwilling subjects. The Act of Union made British rule hateful in Ireland. Coercion has, therefore, been necessary to make British rule possible ; and the united Parliament has been kept pretty busy with Coercion. In the eighty-five years which have elapsed since the Union the Imperial Parliament has passed eighty- our Coercion Acts. The cause of religious as well as civil liberty went back with the destruction of the Irish Parliament. In 1823 Lord Nugent sought to extend to English Catholics the voting privilege conferred by the Irish Protestant Parlia- ment on Irish Catholics. The measure miscarried in the Lords, and, though frequently brought into Parliament, did not become law. It was not until 1829 that English Catholics got the vote. In 1794 Lord Fitzwilliam was sent to Ireland to carry Catholic Emancipation ; he was able to assure the King of " the universal approbation with which the emancipation of the Catholics was viewed on the part of his Protestant subjects." \ He wrote to Lord Carlisle that " not one Protestant corporation scarcely one individual had come forward to deprecate and- oppose the indulgence claimed by the higher order of Catholics." Grattan obtained, immediately after, leave to bring in an * " Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," p. 146. t Ibid. p. 140. Ibid. p. 147. Ibid. p. 144. T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 99 Emancipation Bill, with but three dissentients ; and " few facts," writes Lecky, "in Irish history are more certain than that the Irish Parliament would have carried Emanci- pation if Lord Fitzwilliam had remained in power."* Lecky thus fixes the probable date of Emancipation as 1795 thirty-four years before it was obtained from the United Parliament. "But for the Union," says an even higher authority, " full and complete Emancipation would have been carried before 1803. "f In the one great industry of the Irish people the Union was above all things destructive. Everybody now knows the dread and full meaning of the laud question in the economy of Irish life. As it has been put, the possession of land means the difference between existence and starva- tion. If the Irish Parliament had remained in existence, it is easy to see that the freedom of the land would have followed almost as rapidly as the freedom of the Church. The Parliament that gave the Irish Catholics votes, that was largely favourable to parliamentary reform, and that was ready to admit Catholic members, would have been ready, and indeed would have been necessarily compelled, to carry out a land policy in accordance with the wishes and the interests of the masses of the people. It is pro- bable that half a century ago, if the Irish Parliament had not been destroyed, a Bill would have been passed giving the tenants rights as great as they had to wait for until the days of the Land League and the Act of Mr. Gladstone in 1881. If Epglishmen could be got to realize all this means, they would passionately sympathize with, instead of bitterly opposing, the Irish demand for a native Parliament. * " Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," p. 151. t O'Connell, quoted by MacNeill Swift, " Irish Parliament," &c., P- 95- H 2 loo IRELAND. For what does it mean ? It means that if the Irish Par- liament had lasted, Ireland would have been saved three famines, a million and half of deaths by hunger, the exile of at least three millions of her people, three abortive rebellions, and many cycles of horrible cruelty by landlords and horrible crime by tenants. For a bad land system is at the bottom of all the evils of Ireland. The right to raise the rent, to confiscate improvements, to evict, were the things which made famine inevitable ; through famine, pro- duced plague, wholesale death, universal emigration ; and those rights of the landlords the Imperial Parliament not only did nothing to check, but did much to increase and aggravate. For the destruction of the Irish Parliament was followed by the deterioration of all nobility of spirit among the land- lords, as among large sections of the Protestant population. Within a short period after the passage of the Act of Union, a whole eviction code had been manufactured under the sinister guidance of the late Sir Robert Peel ; and it was this code that, after the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholder in 1829, enabled the landlords to begin that system of wholesale clearances which has laid waste so many parts of Ireland, has impoverished her towns and crowded her workhouses, and created the Kibbon Lodges and the other assassination leagues among the peasantry. It was the eviction code, again, that prepared the country for the dread famine of 1846 to 1849, and for all the horrors of that terrible epoch ; and it was thus that a population which in 1845 had reached to nearly nine millions of people had in 1851 been reduced to about six and a half. If we look to the consequences to England, we find the Act of Union quite as disastrous. At the moment when the Act was under discussion in the Parliament House in College Green, the approaches were guarded by large masses T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 101 of soldiers ready to put down any overt signs of discontent in blood. Ever since that moment England has been com- pelled to keep garrisons in Ireland to suppress any manifes- tations of popular discontent, and periodically to put down desperate though abortive attempts to remove intolerable wrongs by armed rebellion. Within the shores of Ireland, then, the Act of Union has manufactured a large mass of disaffection sometimes silent and sullen, and sometimes menacing and armed ; and has rendered necessary a vast amount of expenditure, such as would be deemed intolerable in the case of any other dependency. The Act of Union, in addition, has compelled England to support in Ireland a huge force of constabulary police only in name drilled, armed, highly paid, thirteen thousand in number, and to all intents and purposes a portion of the armed garrison of the country. It is calculated that at the -present moment the imperial expenses in Ireland are four millions and a half. So much of these four millions and a half as are paid by England and Scotland represent the fine which English and Scotch taxpayers have to pay for the luxury of governing Ireland against the will of her own people. Abroad, the Act of Union has created for England enemies even more fierce, and in some respects more dangerous, than the enemies she has left in Ireland. In America and in many of the British colonies there are Irishmen whose first knowledge of the law made by the Imperial and United Parliament came when, as shivering children, they saw their cursing fathers and weeping mothers driven out of their homes by landlords assisted by the repre- sentatives of English law and by the representatives of English force ; and the late Professor Cairnes a staunch Unionist and a scientific economist declared that if he had passed along the road to the emigrant ship from a ruined home, as so many Irish exiles did, his feelings would have 102 IRELAND. been those of bitter hate for the country and the laws that permitted such things. To English law, then, the Irish exiles in every part of the world bear bitter hate; there are few parts of the world to which large masses of the Irish people have not emigrated ; and it is therefore one of the effects of the Act of Union to have girdled the world with enemies of English power and English rule. Finally, these various things have made the Ireland of to-day one of the poorest, one of the most disturbed, and perhaps the saddest country in the civilized world. The Imperial Parliament has to be stirred to justice by fierce agitation ; the still unnatural relations between the landlords and the tenants are the source of constant collisions and dis- turbance ; capital flies from a country without security and without rest; the spirit of enterprise is dead in a land without the vivifying spirit of liberty ; the towns are in a state of daily increasing decay ; in the fields more acres arc yearly drifting back into the desolate and untilled heath ; the haemorrhage of emigration goes on ; the population is reduced to a little over one-half of what it once was ; the people who go are the young and the strong the people who remain are the old and the weak ; the struggle for existence becomes every year more desperate ; and the marriage-rate of Ireland is lower than that of almost any country in Europe. Here, then, we have a country presenting as many of the morbid conditions of national life as could well exist And how, On the other hand, is it with England ? The life and heart and soul of the British Empire is in the House of Commons, and the House of Commons has ceased to be the pride and glory and guardian of the Empire. The former freedom of debate has been curtailed ; new rules are con- stantly spoken of; the cumbrous machine is breaking down under its own weight ; the smallest reform has to wait for T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 103 years ; and the temper of all parties has deteriorated. In that assembly, too, there is now an element which threatens to be omnipotent, which has less care for the Empire at large than for the welfare of Ireland, and which discusses and decides on almost every question, not from the Imperial but from the Irish standpoint. When debates take place on Imperial concerns it is the Irish vote that turns the scale in the division lobbies ; but the Irish vote is dictated, not so much by considerations for the welfare of the Empire, as by regard for the welfare of Ireland. Parliament lies at the mercy of the representatives of one country in the whole Empire, and through these representatives Ministries can be upset, parties confused, the issues of the general elections and the votes of British electors nullified ; in short, the Act of Union has ruined Ireland, and threatens the ruin of Eng- land through the ruin of her representative institutions. One final element of derangement was added in the last election to the already full cauldron of anarchy and confu- sion. In England, the Irishmen driven by the Act of Union from Ireland have organized themselves into a great electoral force, turning, according to Mr. Trevelyan, no less than forty seats, and possibly destined to be able to decide whether England shall have a Conservative or a Liberal Administration ; and this new force, like the Irish party in Parliament, while deciding English and Imperial struggles, will act with regard not to the interests of the Empire at large, but rather to the welfare of Ireland. This is assuredly a sufficiently grave indictment against any one piece of legislation ; and there are few impartial persons that will be bold enough to deny its accuracy. In any case, even those who contend that the Act of Union has led to the prosperity of Ireland and the strengthening of the Empire and they will be sufficiently bold who will so contend even those do not deny that the present state of 104 IRELAND. things is intolerable, and cannot be allowed to continue. All parties having then arrived at the conclusion that some- thing must be done, we come to the great question, What is to be done ? Practically, opinion is pretty unanimous among men who think out policies, that there are but two alterna- tives without any halfway house, without any possibility of compromise between. The two alternatives are the coercion of Ireland and the maintenance of the Union by the sword ; or the repeal of the Union and the government of Ireland by Irishmen. Though there be no possibility of compromise, there are not wanting po liticians who talk about it. Mr. Chamber- lain has some plan of County Boards, ending in a National Council, which either may mean a vestry, in which case it is too little ; or a Parliament, in which case it had better be called by the name as well as have the power of a Parliament. Then there is a good deal of pointless and stupid talk about the destruction of Dublin Castle. Dublin Castle is an inconvenient metonym. It may mean either the centralization of all authority and administration in the Lord Lieutenant ; or it may mean the offices of a large number of the departments of the country. In the one case its abolition has some, though not much, intelligibility, for decentralization without a Legislature is impossible ; in the latter case it is of course sheer nonsense, as many of the offices at present in Dublin Castle would have to be maintained under any system of Government. There are various other schemes ; such as the representation of Ireland by a Minister, and the aboli- tion of the Viceroyalty. A moment's reflection would show the utter futility of such a proposal. A Minister in the House of Commons implies the presence there also of the eighty-five Irish representatives ; these eighty five represen- tatives are just as much opposed to the proposed, as to the T. P. O'CONNOR, ALP. 105 present system, and the position of a Minister for Ireland, with eighty-five Irish representatives in constant and fierce hostility to him, is, of course, impossible. Then some people speak of a body in Dublin with some power over Railway and Water Bills. This, again, supposes the presence at Westminster of Irish members; and it can easily be supposed how workable would be a body in Dublin which had eighty-five representatives to attack the Minister for Ireland, and to use their voices in frequent discussion and their votes in critical divisions for enlarging the powers of this body. Assuredly every Englishman of sense would prefer that if an Irish Parliament is to be arrived at ultimately, the sooner the journey is travelled and at an end the better for his peace of mind. Then there are those who talk of a good County Bill as a settle- ment of the question. The reform of the scandalous and wicked Grand Jury system is of course one of the great necessities of Irish reform ; but in what way will that get rid of the demand for Home Rule? The so-called Loyalist party in Ireland have already stated their views of such a scheme, and their declaration is, that reform of county government, instead of diminishing, will augment the strength of the party seeking legislative independence. All these schemes of timid or illogical or shallow states- manship may then be dismissed, and we are left to the two alternatives of government by the sword or government by consent. But government by the sword, however easy to talk about in irresponsible newspaper articles, is impossible. It is certainly impossible for any length of time. There are always these eighty-five men, and the experience of Mr. Forster, when he had not half that number to deal with, will show how impossible it is to maintain a regime of coer- cion under the fierce and constant light of parliamentary io6 IRELAND. interrogation and debate. Of course there is the power of disfranchising Ireland and expelling the eighty-five repre- sentatives ; but every politician of note has denounced such an idea, from Lord Randolph Churchill downwards. The truth is, England cannot coerce. Proceeding to destroy the liberties of a nation like Ireland, she is in the position of Hamlet in the closet, denouncing his mother : " Do not look upon me," he says to his father's ghost, " Lest with this piteous action you convert My stern effects : then, what I have to do Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood." What England has to do in suppressing^ erty in Ireland will, ultimately at least, " want true colour." In stabbing at liberty,England is stabbing at the mother of her own prosperity, her own greatness, the largeness of her own place in the history of the world. When Mr. Gladstone was forecasting, in April 1882, the release of Mr. Parnell, he had to confess that coercion had broken down, because coercion was repugnant to the institutions of his country. Surely all experience must show this to be an inevitable fact of English political and party life inevitable from both the good and the evil in this life. The hysterical demands of unpractical litterateurs, or judges speaking in national politics with the black cap suitable to the sentencing of a hapless wretch to violent death, may be left to shriek for more consistency and more brutality in coercion. Trained politicians ought to know that they might as well bay out their throats in calls for the moon. We saw two strongmen practise coercion in Ireland within the last five years : Mr. Forster was thrown over by the Liberals, Lord Spencer was thrown over by the Tories ; and so it will be with every Minister who makes himself the unhappy instrument of the fierce but brief passion of brutality that periodically passes over England in her dealings with Ireland. T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 107 To concession, then, it will ultimately come. There may be a dreary and perhaps even a terrible interval- with the frenzy of unbridled power on the one side, and the frenzy of despair on the other. Every true well-wisher of England or of Ireland, every humane man, every prudent and sensible statesman, ought to exhaust every effort rather than that the immediate future should be made so dark for either England or Ireland ; and the responsibility of those who may have any share in bringing about such a state of relations between the two races, will be as great and terrible and shameful as almost that of any creator of causeless and foolish con- flict in history. But the end, sooner or later, is sure. Irish history, as Sir Charles Gavan Duffy remarks, has, rightly examined, the consistency and unity of an epic. Throughout all the many centuries of connection between the two countries the aspiration for self-government runs often timid and weak and sometimes even apparently dead, but there, all the same and all the time. And this great idea has features as astonishing as its duration. The present Irish movement marks not merely the unity of a nation, but also the unity of a race, and of a race scattered over many countries of the world, separated by daily life, by interests, by oceans, and by continents, from the cradle-land of the Irish race. If we turn to England, on the other hand, we find the Idea of dominance growing weaker with every advancing year. Coercion is no longer applied to Ireland with a light heart, but with shamefacedness ; the dealings of England with Ireland in the past are mentioned with an apology, and the differences between most intelligent and temperate Englishmen and intelligent and temperate Irish- men, as to the future relations between the two countries, are differences of degree rather than of principle. It is an un- equal contest between England and Ireland, and Irish self- government is the assured victor. The important question is, what form the new legislative io8 IRELAND. relations between the two countries should take. Many plans have been suggested : I have neither the right nor the desire to advance anything more than suggestions. Two fundamental principles should, I think, govern the whole settlement. First, the Irish Parliament should be supreme within the shores of Ireland, and in dealing with purely Irish affairs ; and secondly, the Empire is entitled to take due precautions against attacks upon its safety. Ireland should be supreme within the shores of Ireland. This is a demand from which Irishmen should not recede ; for it is the only settlement that is workable. Of course this implies the control of the police by the Irish Adminis- tration. The hubbub about this part of the question suggests a poor opinion of the intelligence of English newspaper writers or politicians. Is it seriously asked whether the Ministers of a country should have the control of the police of the country ? To put the question ought surely to carry its own answer. The Ministers of Ireland will be responsible for the peace and order of Ireland ; and Ministers responsible for peace and order, without any force to maintain peace and order, is a more grotesque form of government than, happily for the reputation of humanity, has yet been found to exist in any age or country. If the police were not at the disposal of the Ministers of Ireland, at whose disposal would they be? At the disposal of Downing Street ? Then Mr. Parnell, being Prime Minister of Ireland, would be compelled to obtain the consent of the English Ministry before he could order the police to clear a mob who were howling outside College Green ; and a riot in Roscommon could not be put down without a Cabinet Council in London, and perhaps a Ministerial crisis at Westminster. Or should the police be at the disposal of some English representative in Ireland ? Could T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 109 there be a more solid guarantee not for peace and order, but for permanent disturbance and chronic disorder than a force at the disposal of an alien executive, and with the responsibility for government thus divided between the elected and native rulers and the irresponsible and the foreign representative? But then it is said the police are fine men, splendidly drilled, well armed the ideal nucleus of an Irish Army of Independence. If the Irish people would only get as much credit for sanity as for malignity and wickedness, such arguments would scarcely be seriously put forward. It is not alone as an armed garrison that the police are unpopular in Ireland so far as they are unpopular ; it is as men at once highly paid and idle the well-fed loafers in a land where hideous toil brings bare subsistence ; the acceptable suitors for well-dowered beauty ; the habitants of well-built and commodious dwellings at the expense of the taxpayers in a land of hovels ; the dreamer of pleasant dreams re- cumbent on trim glass- plots in the long summer days, when the peasant garners scanty crops with perspiring brow. To think that the Irish people would be ready to maintain this vast army of hateful and hated idlers in their poor and penurious land is to show an ignorance of Irish nature that is astounding. As United Ireland not a Whig organ declared in a recent issue, probably one of the very first acts of an Irish Parliament would be to reduce the constabulary from thirteen thousand to three ; to knock the guns out of their hands and replace them with truncheons ; and to confine their activity to the discovery of the burglar and the pickpocket, instead of the extinct race of political conspirators. This fear of separation strikes me as singularly unmanly as well as singularly absurd. One would seriously think that Englishmen had suddenly become convinced that they i io IRELAND. are a nation of nerveless and backboneless cowards. Will legislative independence widen the Irish Channel or alter the vast disproportion between the populations of England and Ireland ? And if the Irish are free to make their own laws ; have no irritating interference ; if their representatives be safe from the insults and calumnies of dukes and other blackguards ; if the Irish nation have the protection of the Empire and few of its burdens ; for what, in the name of all that is reasonable, are they to rebel, unless, contrary to experience of the profound Conservatism of the masses of the Irish in America and the Colonies, the Irish are assumed to be a race inevitably and causelessly rebellious ? But the supremacy of an Irish Parliament within the shores of Ireland would imply the robbery of the landlords and the oppression of the so-called Loyal minority. The landlords and the loyal minority are not synonymous and coterminous, as so many English writers seem to think. The two terms mean two very different things. The loyal minority numbers more than a million ; the landlords number between five and ten thousand individuals, mostly Protestant, but sometimes Catholic. Now, the protection of the landlords may mean the robbery of the majority of the loyal minority, for the majority of the loyal and Protestant, as well as the so-called seditious and Catholic majority, are tenant-farmers ; and measures which would give the landlords more money for their land than it can be made worth to the tenant, would be unjust to the majority of the loyal minority. The Irish Nationalist ought to know no distinction of creed; and it is as much his duty to protect the Orange as it is to protect the Catholic farmer from robbery. And, therefore, the Irish Nationalists would be unfair and dishonest and unjust to the loyal minority as a body by accepting many of the de- mands put forward by that portion of the loyal minority which consists of the landlords. 7. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. in The rights of the loyal minority and of the landlords, in- stead of being identical so far as property is concerned are antagonistic. Nor are they entirely identical even as regards religious interests, because, as I have remarked, a large number of the landlords are Catholic. But, still assuming that the landlords, the tenants, and the shop- keepers of the loyal minority are of the same creed, the de- mand for their protection implies a danger to their religious freedom. The supposition to an Irishman is grotesque. The present leader of the Irish party is a Protestant, and there are four other Protestants in the party : Dr. Tanner, who represents one of the divisions of County Cork, is a Protestant; Mr. Abraham, who represents one of the divisions of Limerick, is a Protestant ; Mr. Douglas Pyne, who represents one of the divisions of County Waterford, is a Protestant ; and Mr. Jeremiah Jordan, who represents one of the divisions of County Clare, is an Ulster Methodist. Moreover, if this point must really be laboured, the prede- cessor of Mr. Parnell in the leadership of the Irish party was Mr. Shaw, and he was a Protestant ; and his prede- cessor, again, was Isaac Butt, and he was a Protestant. To speak of any danger to the Protestant's rights of conscience under such circumstances is very absurd. But if the Protes- tant minority have still any apprehensions, or if their Eng- lish co-religionists be apprehensive about them, by all means let there be some safeguards for their protection. At the same time two things must be observed : first, that with the exception of the small body of rabid Orangemen who attri- bute to others the same sanguinary bigotry as they them- selves are not ashamed to preach, there is really no section of Irish Protestants who have these unmanly fears, and who do not feel confident that they will be able to maintain the same prominent and important place in the future as they have in the past of Irish life. And secondly, it will be 112 IRELAND. a doubtful boon to the Irish Protestants to put them in any position of isolation from the masses of their countrymen. It will be their interest, as I think it will be generally their desire, to throw in their lot frankly with the rest of their countrymen, with the same rights of exactly equal citizenship. There remains that which is the real crux of this question What is to be done with the landlords ? Here again an elementary knowledge of the speeches and pro- posals of the members of the Irish party would do away with some of the bugbears that are frightening English statesman- ship. Mr. Parncll has over and over again told the -farmers of Ireland that they must fight for the land or pay for the land ; and as nobody thinks of fighting for it, of course the farmers were told that they must pay for it. Mr. Parnell was the only politician who ran any serious risk to his popularity or his power in making such a statement, and naturally he made it in good faith. It is pretty clear that the land question must be got out of the way before the national question can be settled. It seems improbable that English opinion will leave the property of the land- lords to the disposition of an Irish Parliament, unless, indeed, British Radicalism, in its hatred of the landed aris- tocracy of this country, might think it desirable to sacrifice the landlords of Ireland, pour encourager les autres. This, however, may be dismissed as an unlikely contingency ; and the plan which will be probably adopted in the long run will be the purchase out of the landlords by the Irish tenant with the assistance of the English Exchequer. There are many objections to this course, which I cannot go into ; but objections must yield to the inevitable, and I believe this solution is inevitable. In the interest alike of the Irish farmer, who has to live off his purchase ; in the interest of the British Exchequer, which ought to have ample security for its advance and the security of the Exchequer will be T. P. a CONNOR, M.P. 113 bad if the bargain of the farmer be foolish the terms of purchase ought to be arranged on strictly economic and economical principles. It ought to be in the instructions of the Purchase Commissioners that they shall give full credit to the farmer for his improvements, in the spirit of Parliament when it passed the Healy clause ; that they will have due regard to the depression of prices, the vicissitudes of British agriculture, the severity of foreign competition ; so that the annual payment may not, like the judicial rent, be a fair-weather protection, that breaks down ruinously before the stress of one or two bad seasons. Finally, there is the guarantee of the Empire from acts directed against its safety and interests. The interference of the Empire ought to have two characteristics : it should be effective, and at the same time it should not be meddle- some or wanton. The way to meet the difficulty which I suggest is a veto by an address of the two Houses of Parlia- ment to the Crown, the address being prefaced by the declaration that the proposed action or legislation of the Irish Parliament is outside the shores of Ireland and the scope of purely Irish affairs ; is an interference with the prerogative of the Crown and dangers the safety of the Empire; and should for these reasons be vetoed. The English party system would be a guarantee against wanton or unwise interference. I do not despair of there being men with the Liberal and enlightened spirit of Charles James Fox, in future as in past English Parliaments, to warn against unwise meddling. A settlement on these lines would, I believe, make Ireland prosperous and peaceful and happy, and lead to the strengthening, to the increased dignity and to the better repute of the Empire. T. P. O'CONNOR. ( "4 ) DR, MATTHEW ROBERTSON. '""P H E people of Great Britain have a genuine love of free- dom, but unfortunately they know but little of the things that have been done and are being done in their name. If the mass of Englishmen and Scotchmen could be accurately informed of the horrible misgovernment which has been carried on in Ireland during the last 700 years, and which in great measure exists even at this moment, they would speedily demand that an end be put to a state of affairs which is disgraceful to England and disastrous to both countries. All the arts of tyranny have been lavishly expended upon " The Sister Isle." Confiscation and rob- bery in a great variety of forms, massacre, transplanting, bribery, banishment, and starvation, grading up to wholesale extermination, have all been employed with great industry and energy. The cattle trade of Ireland was destroyed to please English landlords, and the Irish colonial trade was crushed to gratify English merchants. Upon the ruins of their cattle trade a people often reproached for lack of energy developed a flourishing woollen industry, and English- men blush to read that by an Act of the English Parliament in 1698 this trade was annihilated, and a vast population thrown into utter destitution. Deprived of their industries, and with capital and enterprise banished from the country, the Irish people were flung back on the soil as their only source of livelihood, and from that time to the present hour the favourite form of oppression has been to exact rent for DR. MA TTHE W ROBER TSON. 1 1 5 the buildings and improvements which their necessities compelled them to make, and by the aid of legal tricks and quibbles to confiscate their property altogether. Yet after all this there are many people who are surprised that the minds of Irishmen are not overflowing with gratitude for the blessings of English rule. It is true that the darkest days of Ireland are past, but unfortunately the centuries have been bound each to each by consistent bad government. Nations have long memories, and besides, a man has no temptation to forget that his grandfather was hanged for demanding the common rights of citizenship, and that his father was robbed of the proceeds of a long life of toil, when his own back is still sore from the plank bed of coercion, and his footsteps dogged by a Government spy and an armed policeman. The government of Ireland at the present moment is a despotism disguised under parliamentary forms and tempered by obstruction, agitation, and outrages. The mildest and most moderate reforms have again and again been refused by the ignorant prejudices of one House of Parliament and the selfish rapacity of the other. The Land Act of 1881 was a great and just measure, but it could not be passed until evicting and rack-renting landlords went in fear of their lives. Even when it was passed the English House of Lords and the official classes in Ireland have succeeded in depriving it of a great part of its value. Many of the grievances under which Ireland groans, such as the difficulty of forcing local bills at great cost through a lawyer-ridden and lord-ridden Parliament, exist also in England, but in a less aggravated form. But there is a vast field of rank and luxuriant abuses connected with the administration of law which Ireland has all to herself. The Irish executive is composed of the Lord Lieutenant and his chief secretary, who come and go even more swiftly than the party Governments which appoint I 2 n6 IRELAND. them. If they are not now taken " wild from Brooks's," as in the days of Lord Northington, they are generally very ignorant of Irish affairs, and fall an easy prey to the per- manent officials in Dublin Castle. This reactionary body is maintained in power by some 30,000 soldiers and 12,000 armed police. They treat the people whom they govern with contempt, and are repaid with most intense repug- nance. It is by these permanent officials, divided into small committees, that the work of local government, falling under the heads of Local Government Board, Public Works, Prisons Board, Education, &c., is mainly done. The counties are manipulated by means of resident magistrates and the " great unpaid," in neither of whom have the people the smallest confidence. Perhaps the most important question which statesmen and politicians have to answer at the present moment is whether a good County Government Bill and the abolition of the 10 rating franchise for municipal purposes, together with a complete reform which would put the administration of the law in all its departments in the hands of those who possess the confidence of the Irish people, would be sufficient to effect the pacification of the country and satisfy all reasonable requirements. To that question, after due con- sideration, the answer must be No, for many reasons, but chiefly the following : The ardent patriotism of the Irish nation has been wounded and lacerated by centuries of oppression, and they will never be satisfied until they have an assembly in Dublin which will fairly embody the idea of self-government in all Irish affairs, and which will provide at once a legitimate object of patriotic sentiment and a worthy arena for Irish genius. Irishmen, moreover, will never be content to administer laws which they regard as unjust, which they did not make, and which they cannot amend. If they attempted to do so, the Irish leaders would DR. MA TTHE W ROBER TS ON. 117 discredit themselves with their countrymen, and the people would be more hopelessly discontented than ever. Further, it is only by establishing a national assembly in Dublin that we can get the minority adequately represented, and make the leaders who possess the confidence of some four millions of the Irish people fully responsible for their acts and for the maintenance of law and order. The particular form in which self-government should be given will not only demand but will tax to the utmost all the highest powers of statesmanship. Had our own parliamentary machinery been fairly satisfactory, I should have thought that a scheme of three Grand Committees, one for each of the three countries, composed of all the members for that country, endowed with large and well-defined powers as to local legislation, and sitting for a portion of each year in Dublin, Edin- burgh, and London (with perhaps a fourth at Swansea), would have been the most efficient as well as the most palatable scheme. But all plans of this kind break them- selves to pieces against that hideous anachronism, a hereditary House of Tory landlords, with an absolute veto on all legislation. The separation of Ireland from England is absolutely out of the question. It was not asked for by Flood, Grattan, or O'Connell, nor is it demanded as yet by the responsible leaders of the Irish people. It would be disastrous to both countries, but chiefly to Ireland. The fiat of Nature has made the union of the two countries as indissoluble and irrevocable as that of Sweden and Norway. This fact is fully recognised by the vast majority of Irish- men, and nothing would prevail to alter that conviction except obstinate and protracted opposition to legitimate demands for Home Rule. We are told that Home Rule would only pave the way to separation, but the danger of separation lies in the hostility and alienation of the Irish people, and these can only be charmed away by granting ii8 IRELAND. the fullest measure of local self-government which is con- sistent with the unity and defence of the Empire. The threats of rebellion made by Orange Tories, who display the quality of their loyalty by threatening to " kick the Queen's crown into the Boyne," are unworthy of serious attention. These fierce individuals have been fed on domination and privilege, and they have secreted spleen and intolerance. But it is probable that, with a cessation of the evil diet, their mental secretions would rapidly improve. The adjustment of the land question is a much more serious difficulty. All honest men on both sides of the Channel would like to see the landlords get a fair, but no more than a fair, compen- sation. It is admitted that the average reduction of 19 per cent, which has been made on the score of tenants' improve- ments is totally inadequate in the face of falling prices and failing crops. This fact, together with the tampering with the Healy clause of the Land Act, has made the judicial rents comparatively useless as a basis of valuation. The British taxpayer, who has already paid heavily for the luxury of maintaining a race of rack-renting landlords in Ireland, must not be further taxed for their benefit. The notion that Englishmen should go on denying to a sister nation the primary rights of citizenship, and maintaining at vast expense a huge army to collect rents often cruelly unjust, is a pro- posal so extravagant that it only needs to be stated to be dismissed. On the other hand, there are far greater dangers in denying Ireland's claims to self-government than in granting them : ' ' Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. ' The great body of sensible and moderate men, who would now be amply content with Home Rule, would by refusal be goaded into demanding separation ; there would be DR. MA TTHE W ROBER TSON. 1 1 9 renewed disorder and disturbances in Ireland, and the last gleam of confidence in England's justice would disappear. It is very well for a few fire-eaters on the London press to talk lightly of sending over Lord Wolseley to "pacify the country." These inky swashbucklers appear to imagine that Ireland's ills can be promptly cured by Napoleon's " whiff of grapeshot " or another taste of Skeffington's artillery. But Wellington, who was a greater soldier than either Wolseley or Napoleon, knew and confessed that grapeshot and artillery were alike powerless against the passive resistance of a nation determined on obtaining its freedom. Nor do the perils end with disorders in Ireland. In America and in the colonies there are many millions of thriving citizens who are either Irish-born or of Irish parentage. They have carried with them, or have inherited from their parents, bitter memories of cruel and unexpiated wrong. They at least have not forgotten the fact that one million persons perished in Ireland in the famine of 1846, or that of those whom the famine spared nearly a quarter of a million were evicted in the four succeeding years. These men are anxiously watching the attempt to get justice for Ireland by constitutional means, many of them not disguising their hope that it may fail. One of their spokesmen said the other day, amidst the thundering applause of an Irish- American audience, that it was not the question whether Ireland should get her rights, but " whether hell should break out in London," and he left no doubt as to his meaning. "The dynamite," he said, " which England has used to crush weak nations and struggling patriots in various parts of the world, we will use against her, if she refuses to our country the freedom which is her right." At this crisis in our history the eyes of the whole nation, and indeed of the whole world, are turned to one man. Mr. Gladstone saved Ireland to the 120 IRELAND. Empire once before by the Alabama arbitration. Let him save it once again by a bold and just measure of Home Rule. He will hear much of what is feasible and what is popular ; but every enlightened lover of his country would wish him to turn a deaf ear to empty and ignorant clamour, and ask him to put before the country, not the scheme which may be most popular for the moment, but the scheme which is absolutely the best of which the nature of the case admits. Let him expound the bearings of the question as only he can expound them ; let him make his appeal to that higher and better nature of the .British people to which he has never appealed in vain ; and it will come to pass that to such a scheme, founded alike on nature and on justice, the best men both in Ireland and Great Britain will steadily rally. He will show that trust in the people is a Liberal principle, which applies to Ireland as well as to England, and he will crown a career rendered illustrious by great achievements by the greatest and most beneficent of them all, by a measure which shall restore peace and prosperity to Ireland, and give stability and safety to the Empire. MATTHEW ROBERTSON. THE LORD MAYOR OF DUBLIN. (RIGHT HON. T. D. SULLIVAN, M.P.) T THINK the wise thing and the first thing for England to do is to allow the Irish people to manage their own local affairs. England has had the management of them for centuries, and the results are poverty, discontent, dis- affection, Coercion Acts, attempted rebellions, and all sorts of trouble in Ireland. These are just the things that a similar system of govern- ment would produce among any other people in the world. The irritation against England, the so-called "disloyalty," the desire of revenge upon her felt by masses of the Irish people, would assuredly abate if the conditions of life for them in their own country were made more tolerable and more honourable. Never will they willingly submit to such domination over their affairs as England has been exercising hitherto. If many of them desire separation, what wonder, when the connection is humiliating, injurious, and consequently hateful to them ? Make it pleasant, or at all events harmless, to them ; allow them the fair and reasonable right of control over the internal affairs of their own country ; and by a law of Nature the strain between the two countries would cease. The ill-feeling would decline, and the interests which they have 122 IRELAND. in common would operate to make them good neighbours and friends. I hope we are near a settlement of the trouble. If not, all I can say is, that I believe the longer it is delayed the worse it will be for England perhaps for both countries. T. D. SULLIVAN. ( 123 ) MICHAEL DAVITT. '"PHE question is frequently asked, " What will satisfy the Irish people?" And the answer is as frequently volunteered, " Nothing. Nothing will satisfy them but total separation and that they won't get." It is an illogical way of answering a question, but pardonable in an Englishman ; and the impatience which it manifests is also strikingly characteristic. Your ordinary Englishman entertains the pretty conceit that English rule is of such a beneficent character that any people who do not tamely submit to it are to be pitied and dragooned. While in particular, the Irish people, for their obstinacy in refusing to see any virtue in English rule in Ireland, " must be clearly made to under- stand," and " must be told once for all," that England will maintain her hold upon Ireland at all costs. All this talk is indulged in really for the sake of concealing the chagrin which England experiences in consequence of the fact, re- vealed in recent years, that the people of Ireland have dis- covered how to make it more difficult for England to rule Ireland, than to govern all the rest of her vast empire put together. English statesmen, even now, are devising a middle course between things as they are, and total separa- tion. They are casting about for a scheme which will com- bine the characteristics of modern statesmanship a scheme, for example, which will involve as small a concession as possible to the demand of the people concerned, and have a fair chance of passing the House of Lords. Eminent 124 IRELAND. statesmen have more than once challenged Irish public men to say what they want, but the required answer has not been forthcoming. There have been answers, but they have been too reasonable. English statesmen have not been able to offer upon them the comment, " We told you so, the thing demanded is utterly out of the range of practical politics, and, in point of fact, is absolutely out of the question." The answer really required is such a one as English statesmen can meet with a nonpossumus. And for this reason, English statesmen, I repeat, know that a substantial concession will have to be made to the genius of Irish nationality within the next few years. The demand for it is too strong to be resisted ; for the Irish race have to be dealt with now. If at home on Irish soil the people can "make the ruling powers uneasy " to such an extent as I have indicated, in Westminster their representatives can clog the wheels of legislation and endanger the very existence of Government by parliamentary methods ; while abroad, in Great Britain, America, Australia, Canada, the exiled Irish have discovered how to operate on the flank, so to speak, by elevating the Irish question into the position of a national or colonial issue. Further, England's guilt towards Ireland is known and commented on all over the world. Further still, the real people of England the working men of England have of late been asking for the reasons why Ireland should be perpetually discontented, and the answers they have received, to the credit of their common sense, be it said, do not appear to have satisfied them. Respectable England is very angry ; and, to conceal their annoyance at the inevit- able, and to pave the way for a concession, English states- men ask the question of Irish public men " What do you want ? " and require an answer to which they may return an emphatic " impossible." But this is only diplomacy. They only desire us to say how much we want, in order to say in MICHAEL DAVITJ, 125 reply how little they will give. They ask us to " formulate our demand," that they, in formulating their concession, may assure their opponents of its comparative innocence. Responsible Irish public men have declined to fall into the trap. And they have acted very wisely. For why should Irish public men show their hand rather than English Prime Ministers ? Apart altogether from considerations of this character, however, there are others of a distinctly Irish nature which the leaders of the National movement in Ireland have to take into account. The varying shades of National senti- ment may not be ignored. Let us therefore analyse the degrees of intensity of Irish Nationalist aspirations. We have first, the Extremists, those who believe that total separation from England is the only thing that would satisfy Irish genius or develop it properly. These include the most self-sacrificing Irishmen. They represent, in their aspirations for Irish liberty, those who have made the most illustrious names in Ireland's history. They include many cultured men, especially among the expatriated portion of the race, but their main strength is in the working classes. Patriotism is purer among the industrial order because less modified by mercenary motives and less liable to corrupting influences. But the Extremists or Separatists are divided among themselves upon the question of method. There are Separatists who advocate physical force, believing moral force that is, constitutional means, ineffectual and de- moralizing. This section includes men who have never tried moral force, and who believe solely either in " honour- able warfare " or " dynamite." It also includes those who have tried moral force, and given it up in despair. Then there are the Separatists, who, with the experiences of '48 and '67 before their minds, rely upon constitutional action alone. 126 IRELAND. Next in importance to the Extremists come the Home Rulers, or Federalists, who may be divided into those who disbelieve in the possibility of Separation and those who do not see its necessity. This section of the National party includes some of the ablest and most earnest men in Ireland. Their methods, I need hardly say, are strictly constitutional. No Irish leader can afford to ignore either of these two principal phases of Irish National sentiment. Were such a man to commit himself to a definite scheme, at the mere invitation of an English Minister, he would run the risk of alienating that section of his supporters whose views were not represented in his proposals. It is an obvious remark that such a contingency would not be unwelcome to English statesmen. From what I have just said, it will be readily perceived how difficult is the task to which Irish popular leaders are asked to address themselves. Nevertheless, I shall venture to outline a scheme of local and National self-government which, I believe, would com- mand the support of the majority of the Irish people at home and abroad, and which would probably receive a fair trial at the hands of the Extremists ; though its operation would undoubtedly be watched with a jealous eye. In the first place, there should be established in Ireland a system of county government, by means of Elective Boards, to take the pla l6 4 Luzern 580 134,806 Uri 415 23,694 Schwyz 351 5 r > 2 35 Untenvalden 295 ,, 27,348 Glarus 267 34,213 Zug 92 22,994 Freiberg 644 115,400 Solothurn 303 80,424 Basel 177 124,372 Schafthausen ,, 116 ,, 38,348 Appenzell 162 66,799 St. Gallen 780 210,401 Graubtinden ,, 2 )774 94>99^ Aargau 542 198,645 Thurgan 382 99>552 Ticino 1,095 i3,777 Vaud 1,245 238,730 Valais 2,026 100,216 Neuchatel 312 103,732 Geneve 109 101,595 Some of the cantons are vesting the legislative power in 160 IRELAND. the " Landsgemeinde " i.e., the whole body of adult citizens, assembled on certain days for the purpose of deliberating in open-air meetings on the proposed laws ; but most of the cantons have a legislative Chamber, called "Great Council," elected by all voters (same franchise as for federal votes). In almost all of these Cantons the electors co- operate with the Great Councils, possessing either the " facultative " or the "obligatory " referendum. The cantons have their own constitutions, which must be approved by the federal authorities, and are vetoed if con- taining anything opposed to the principle contained in the Federal Constitution. The cantons deal independently with the follo\ving matters (besides subjects of minor importance): i. Education. 2. Taxation. 3. Criminal law. 4. Civil law (with exceptions mentioned above). 5. Tribunals (there being, however, a Federal Tribunal as Court of Supreme Appeal. 6. Police. 7. National churches. 8. Public works. 9. Communal administration. 10. Pauperism. 161 THE DUAL SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT OF HUNGARY AND AUSTRIA. BY DR. F. L. WEINMANN. TOURING the recent discussion of the question of Home Rule for Ireland in the newspapers, reference has repeatedly been made to the position of Hungary in her political and constitutional relations to Austria as an example that might with advantage be applied to Ireland in order to satisfy her demand for self-government. Although there are certain points of similarity in the relative positions of Hungary towards Austria and Ireland to Great Britain, yet in many other and very important respects there is as wide a difference between the two countries as possibly can be. As in some other countries, so in Austria, the first germs of Constitutionalism may be traced many centuries back, and though no such solid foundation-stone can be pointed to as the glorious Magna Charta of which the English are so justly proud, already in mediaeval ages the creation of con- sultative and deliberative assemblies had been effected, with the view of achieving political unity, and thereby the several classes of the State were led into a more or less direct par- ticipation in the work of government. The earliest Austrian representative bodies, or Diets, consisted of the so-called four Estates the Prelates, the Barons, the Knights, and the Citizens. Their origin dates very far back, and from the time M 1 62 IRELAND. of the Emperor Maximilian's death, in 1519, up to the reign of Joseph II., a sort of " Reichsrath," or Imperial Council, more or less complete, is continually recurring, and has, with many modifications and long interruptions, endured to our days. The chief aim the Government had then in view was to a certain degree the same as now namely, unity of adminis- tration, or rather co-operation of each separate part of the monarchy with the other parts of it, so as to arrive at a just distribution of general political rights and duties without encroaching upon the particular privileges of each nationality. Joseph II. shelved all representative institutions ; but Leopold II., immediately after his accession, convoked the Diets of every province, in order to enable them to submit their grievances and wishes to him. In the first Diet of 1790 the cities were represented; the following year, how- ever, they were excluded ; and henceforth it became cus- tomary to invite the Fourth Estate to be present only at the reading of financial reports, and to record their vote to edicts of taxation in writing. Whilst the Estates of the so-called hereditary Austrian provinces sank by degrees into insignificance, the Hun- garian Constitution, though far from being a model Consti- tution, or in any way in accordance with the principles of modern constitutional life, remained in all force, and was recognized by Joseph II. when he revoked, shortly before his death, all the measures decreed during his reign against the free exercise of it. Its validity was acknowledged until the year 1848, and though its abrogation was greatly regretted at the time by all the Hungarian patriots, their new Constitution, voted in that year, which was long in abeyance, was ultimately recognized by the Emperor's sanc- tion on February 17, 1867, and now forms the foundation of Hungary's political independence. But severe and long CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 163 was the struggle until the Hungarians had achieved this point. Indeed, it was not until the end of that eventful year 1866, during which Austria, after her defeat in the battles of Koniggratz and Sadowa, was deprived of her influence and position in Germany, and relieved of that great burden and standing source of weakness, the posses- sion of Venice, that Hungary thanks to the wise and inde- fatigable exertions of Baron von Beust, the Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs at that time, in which he was most ably and energetically assisted by that distinguished Hungarian patriot, Francis Deak, the leader of the moderate Hungarian Liberals at last, after a struggle of nineteen years, stood upon the threshold of the fulfilment of her wishes. In an address drawn up by Francis Deak, the Hungarian Diet, which had been prorogued on account of the war, put into a precise form the position and the demands of Hun- gary for the re-establishment of a parliamentary and legal municipal Government. Hungary, it was stated, required a real constitutional rule, the establishment of which was by no means a political impossibility. By a rescript of the Emperor, dated the i7th of November, and addressed to the Hungarian Diet, his Majesty replied, that in resuming the thread of negotiations with the Diet, on the basis of the terms mentioned in the Speech from the Throne, the principal object to be accomplished was the constitutional settlement of the connection of the different parts of the monarchy, and the speedy re-establishment of the autonomous rights of Hungary. The Emperor regretted the prorogation of the Diet just at the time when the sub-committee of the Com- mission of 67 members had drawn up their report with reference to the discussion and the treatment of the common or imperial affairs, which his Majesty recognized as a fitting basis for the establishment of a constitutional settlement The rescript also indicated the several points in regard to M 2 1 64 IRELAND. which it appeared requisite that the special attention of the Estates and the representatives should be directed. These were : firstly, the maintenance of the unity of the army with unity of command, its organization, and also the rules regu- lating the terms of service and recruitment ; secondly, the regulation, according to uniform principles, of the customs, of the indirect taxation, of the State monopoly system, and of the public debt and State credit. " If," continued the rescript, " the deliberations of the Diet result in removing the obstacles connected with the unity of the monarchy, which must be upheld, then the constitutional wishes and 'demands of Hungary, put forward in the address of the Diet, will be fulfilled by the appointment of a responsible Ministry, and by the restoration of the municipal autonomy. The system of the responsibility of the Government will be introduced, not only in Hungary, but in all parts of the monarchy. The detailed application and realization of the principles refer- ring to the common affairs, as well as to the modifications to be introduced in the laws of 1848, will be carried out by re- sponsible Ministers, to be appointed in agreement with the Estates and representatives in Diet assembled." Shortly before Christmas, on the 2oth of December 1866, Baron von Beust, accompanied by the Hungarian Court Chancellor, paid a visit to Pesth, in order to confer with the leading men of the country, and hold out the olive branch to that uneasy and dissatisfied kingdom, the Cabinet of Vienna having come to the conclusion to make the Hungarians all concessions compatible with the unity of the empire and the duty of the Government towards all the other nationalities of the monarchy. Being a conglomeration of different countries and differ- ent nationalities, it was no small task to give each country the proper Constitution, and then to mould the various ele- ments into such a form as to make the governmental machine CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 165 perform its work in a satisfactory and beneficial manner ; but Baron von Beust's negotiations at Pesth were attended with decided success. His programme was based on the principle of the autonomy of Hungary and the endowment of all the other countries of the empire with an equal amount of liberty and autonomy. On the 6th of February the Committee concluded their labours on the common affairs, and their report was to form the basis of the settlement of the pending differences between the Crown and the kingdom of Hungary. On the 1 8th of the same month an imperial rescript was read in both Houses of the Hungarian Diet, announcing that the Emperor assented to the demands embodied in the Diet's address of the iyth of January relative to the decree for the reorganization of the army. The Emperor at the same time, confiding in the loyalty of the Hungarian nation, and putting entire faith in her readiness to co-operate with him to preserve the empire, restored the Hungarian Con- stitution, charging Count Julius Andrassy with the formation of a responsible Ministry ; thus constituting the empire on the dualistic principle. He professed to desire the integrity of Hungary, and promised to defend the Constitution ; but hoped and expected that all the people would defend the throne and the empire, that the Diet would fulfil the terms of the arrangement as promised in its address, would carry out the object of the Pragmatic Sanction, and grant an indemnity to the Ministry. It was a proud moment for the patriotic statesman when Count Andrassy, on the 24th of February, announced to the Diet his appointment as President of the Ministry, submit- ting at the same time the list of his colleagues, who, without passion or resentment, had with him steadily pursued the path of constitutional legality, had reconciled the kingdom with the Crown, and restored it to its old place in the 1 66 IRELAND. Austrian State system. It was also a triumph for Baron von Beust, the first Austrian statesman who had had the courage and resolution to carry the most urgent but long- delayed settlement to a satisfactory conclusion. Hungary was reconciled ; her ardently cherished aspirations were realized ; the discord which had so long subsisted between the Emperor and his Hungarian subjects, and which was disastrous alike for Austria and for Hungary, threatening the whole State with dissolution, was brought to a close ; and the solemn coronation of Francis Joseph at Pesth, with the crown of St. Stephen, on the 8th of June 1867, symbolized the final restoration of peace with the Hungarian people. Hungary has since that date had a national re- presentation based on the most liberal law of election ; she has a Ministry dependent on parliamentary control ; a Con- stitution with the highest constitutional guarantees, and the solemn oath of her Sovereign to preserve that Constitution ; she has the undivided rule of her national Government over the entire territory of the crown of St. Stephen, the fullest measure of religious freedom, and an army of her own. There remains now only to summarize briefly the various laws enacted on the basis of the settlement concluded, in accordance with the terms of the report of the special Parliamentary Commission. They are seven in number : 1. The law of i2th June 1867, for the regulation of the affairs regarded as common to the whole empire. 2. The law of 27th December 1867, respecting the proportionate share to be contributed by Hungary, accord- ing to the preceding law, towards the expenditure of the common or imperial affairs. 3. The laws of 24th December 1867 and 27th December 1867, by which the share to be contributed annually from the Hungarian revenues towards the liquidation of the common State debt is regulated. CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 167 4. The laws of 27th December 1867 and 27th June 1878, respectively, relating to the conclusion of a com- mercial and customs union between Hungary, as an in- dependent constitutional State, and the Austrian portions of the monarchy. I. Imperial affairs, or affairs regarded as common between countries of Austria proper and the countries of the Hungarian crown, are the following : 1. All foreign affairs, including the diplomatic and commercial representation of the empire in foreign countries, and all measures rendered necessary by virtue of international treaties, reserving, however, the constitutional sanction of such international treaties, in so far as such should be required, to the Legislatures of the two portions of the monarchy, the Austrian Reichsrath at Vienna and the Hungarian Reichstag at Pesth. 2. All military affairs, including those of the imperial navy, excepting, however, the legislative authorization for the levying of recruits, and the legislative enactments relating to the military service in general, and the distribu- tion and quartering as well as the maintenance of the troops ; also the regulation of the civil rights of the soldiery, and all matters concerning the duties and obligations of the troops not strictly appertaining to military service and discipline. 3. All matters of imperial finance having reference to the common expenditure, and in particular the legislative approval of the respective budgets, and the audit of the accounts. The following, though not subject to common adminis- tration, shall be treated according to uniform principles periodically to be agreed upon : i . All commercial affairs, and in particular the legislation as to customs duties and imposts to be levied. 1 68 IRELAND. 2. Legislation with reference to the indirect taxation in regard to manufactures and industrial productions. 3. The regulation of the money standard and coinage. 4. The regulations required in respect of those railway lines which affect the interests of both halves of the monarchy. 5. The organization of the system of defence. The expenditure required for the administration of common affairs is to be shared in proportion by the two halves of the monarchy, as may be determined by common agreement of the two Legislatures, with the sanction of the monarch. In case no agreement should be arrived at by the two Legislatures, the proportionate share to be contributed by each half of the monarchy will be fixed by the Emperor, but only for one year. The provision for the proportionate contribution is, however, a matter to be dealt with by the respective Legislatures. In regard to loans rendered necessary in behalf of the expenditure for common i.e., imperial affairs, the condi- tions as well as the terms of repayment, and the disburse- ment of the same, must be treated in the same manner as other imperial affairs. The administration of common or imperial affairs will be placed in the hands of a responsible common Ministry, which, however, is prohibited from conducting any of the separate affairs of government of one or the other of the two halves of the monarchy, in conjunction with their ministerial functions as to the administration of the imperial affairs. All measures, ordinances, &c., concerning the command and the organization of the army are the exclusive prero- gative of the Sovereign. The right of legislation appertaining to the Legislatures CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 169 of both halves of the monarchy will be exercised by a separate parliamentary body the Delegations composed of sixty members (of whom one-third are to be elected by simple majority from among the members of the Upper House, and the other two-thirds from among the deputies of the House of Representatives) from each Legislature of the two portions of the monarchy. Substitutes for absen- tees, or vacancies occurring, will be elected by each of the two Houses of the Austrian and the Hungarian Central Diets, in the proportion of ten of the Upper House to twenty of the Lower House. The election of Delegates and substitutes takes place annually at the commencement of each session. Previous members may be re-elected. The Delegations are summoned annually by the Emperor to meet in special session alternately at Vienna and at Pesth. They elect each their own president, vice-presi- dent, secretaries, and other officials required. To the competence of the Delegations belong chiefly all matters concerning the imperial affairs of the empire. All other matters are excluded from their constitutional func- tions. All bills, motions, &c., must be submitted to each Delegation separately by the common Ministry. All laws to be passed on matters within the competence of both Delegations require the unanimous concurrence of both the Delegations ; and in case of no unanimity being achievable, the assent of a majority of the votes taken in a division of a joint meeting of both Delegations is necessary, subject in each case to the sanction of the Emperor. The right of impeachment of the common Ministry is vested in both the Delegations. At least thirty members of each Delegation must be present to form a quorum, and all motions and resolutions must be passed by an absolute majority of votes. Voting by proxy is not permitted. Retirement from the Reichs- 1 70 IRELAND. rath or Reichstag implies retirement likewise from the membership of the respective Delegations. With the disso- lution of either the Austrian Reichsrath or the Hungarian Reichstag the functions of the Delegations cease also. The new Reichsrath or Reichstag elects at its meeting a fresh Delegation each. The sittings of the Delegations are open to the public. Each Delegation is entitled to demand that, in case of a divergence of opinion, the question under consideration shall be decided by a joint vote ; two-thirds at least of the members of each Delegation being required to be present at such joint meeting to form a quorum. The decision is carried by the absolute majority of the votes at the division. II. By the laws of 27th December 1867 and 27th June 1878, the proportionate amount to be contributed annually from the Austrian and the Hungarian State Treasury respectively towards the common expenditure of the monarchy has been fixed by mutual legislative agreement at seventy per cent, for the Austrian portion of the monarchy, and at thirty per cent, for the countries of the Hungarian crown ; but when subsequently the military frontier was incorporated with Hungary, the proportions were amended to 68'6 for Austria, and Hungary 31 '4 per cent. Hungary having an equal representation with Austria in the management of their common affairs, this arrangement would seem to give an undue advantage to Hungary over Austria, but in practice it has, on the whole, worked well. This proportion of the respective contributions shall remain unalterably in force for a period of ten years from January i, 1866, till December 31, 1877, and Decem- ber 31, 1887, respectively; to be renewed hereafter, by common agreement, periodically, from ten to ten years. CONSTITUTION OF A USTRIA-HUNGAR Y. 171 By sect. 64 of the law of iath June 1867 it has been pro- vided that the net amount of revenue derived from the cus- toms duties, as an imperial source of State income, shall above all things be applied towards the defrayment of the common expenditure ; but with this limitation, that from this net amount of customs revenues all drawbacks on account of duties paid at the custom-houses on export goods shall first be deducted, and the balance devoted to the reduction of the gross amount of the common expenditure, which is to be lessened approximately by that amount in the budget estimates. III. By the laws of the 24th and 2yth December 1867 it was enacted that, commencing from January r, 1868, the countries of the Hungarian Crown shall have to contribute, unalterably and irrevocably, towards the redemption and the charges of the Imperial State debt, the sum of 29,188,000 florins, including 11,776,000 florins to be paid in specie. The floating debt, consisting of notes and other paper currency, amounting at that time altogether to 312 million florins, was by that law placed under the joint guarantee of both divisions of the monarchy. A special Liquidation Commission was appointed for the examination and adjustment of all the assets of the central (imperial) finances, which, with the exclusion of the arrears of the taxes to which each part of the monarchy is propor- tionately entitled, were designed for the payment of the in- terest and capital of the public debt due up to the last day of December 1867. Both the Treasury of the countries of the Hungarian Crown and that of the western division of Aus- tria are bound to transmit every month to the common imperial exchequer, as is the case in respect of their con- tributions towards the expenditure of the administration of the common affairs of the empire, a certain portion of their monthly revenues on account of their contribution towards 172 IRELAND. the redemption, including the payment of the interest of the national debt, which monthly remittances must be of the same amount, in proportion to the monthly receipts, as the sum total of the contributions compared with the gross amount of the budget estimates of the expenditure of each current year. IV. In accordance with the laws of 27th December 1867 and 27th June 1878, respectively, in regard to the commercial and customs union established between the countries of the Hungarian Crown and the Austrian portions of the monarchy, the whole territory of both divisions of the-empire constitutes, for the purpose of the management of all com- mercial matters, customs, and navigation affairs, during the whole term this agreement is in force, one entire State, cir- cumscribed by one common customs boundary. Consequently, neither of the two divisions of the mon- archy will have the right during this time to impose upon articles of trade or manufacture which are being transmitted from any of the different countries of the one half of the empire to those of the other half, and vice versa, any kind of imposts import, export, or transition duties or any tolls or taxes whatsoever, or to establish for this purpose any intermediate customs boundary. Either division of the empire is permitted to charge any inland duties of whatever description no matter for whomsoever levied upon articles of commerce imported from any parts of the other division, only so far and to such an extent as the similar native industrial and commercial products or manufactures of its own division are burdened with home duties in any of the various countries within its own territory. The treaties concluded with foreign States for the regulation of the international commercial and economical relations, such as treaties of commerce, customs conven- CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 173 lions, navigation treaties, consular, post, and telegraph conventions, are considered equally binding for the various countries of the two divisions of the empire. The negotiation and conclusion of treaties or conventions of a similar character by the Minister for Foreign Affairs can in future, however, only be effected subject to the assent of the constitutional factors of the empire the Austrian and Hungarian central Parliaments and the concurrence of the special Ministers of the two halves of the empire. The collection and administration of the customs re- venues are reserved exclusively to the respective Govern- ments of the two divisions of the empire within the limits of their particular territory. The control of all matters connected with the manage- ment of ports and harbours and maritime sanitary affairs and sea navigation, including sea fisheries, will be exercised by the respective Governments of the two divisions of the country separately, but according to uniform rules and conform principles. All matters having reference to the protection of sea- trading vessels and their crews, and the protection of the sailors and their interests in foreign countries, belong to the jurisdiction of the imperial and royal consulates in those countries, and the common Minister for Foreign Affairs. All shipping and other navigation dues and charges, the collection and administration of which must take place according to uniform rules and regulations, belong to the Government of the country in which they have been col- lected. The same rules apply to all local taxation, and such indirect taxes as directly affect articles of consumption, such -as the excise duties on beer, alcoholic drinks, sugar, &c. 174 IRELAND. The existing monetary system of Austrian currency, as well as the metrical system of weights and measures, shall remain in force. There shall be perfectly free intercourse and equality, without let or hindrance, in respect of all trade, commerce, and occupation, and the exercise of one's profession or business, &c., between the inhabitants of all countries of the two territorial divisions constituting the empire. The same principles of parity apply to all patents of inventions, protection of trade-marks, &c., hitherto granted and henceforth to be granted in accordance with the exist- ing laws, which shall be valid equally in the countries of both divisions of the monarchy. The administration of the post and telegraph service, organized and regulated on general uniform principles, is a matter solely under the control of the respective home Governments. This commercial and customs union shall remain in force from the ist July 1878 till 3ist December 1887, and at the expiration of that term continued or be renewed periodically every ten years. The concluding law of the series, regulating the political and other relations between Hungary and Austria, which emanated from the settlement of 1867, is the law of the 1 7th of November 1868, by which the convention concluded in reference to the settlement of the political and con- stitutional relations between Hungary and Croatia, Sla- vonia and Dalmatia, was sanctioned, which countries henceforth form, on the basis of the Pragmatic Sanction, or fundamental charter of the Emperor Charles VI. of 1720, of the Dual Empire, one united State community, as well in relation to the other individual States under the dominion of his Majesty as in relation to foreign countries. CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 175 These countries enjoy, as integral parts of the countries of the Crown of St. Stephen, in administrative and legislative respects and executive power, the same consitutional inde- pendence and autonomy as Hungary, and are represented in the Hungarian Ministerial Council by a separate Minister without portfolio. They also send, in proportion to the number of their population, twenty-nine deputies (two of them to the Upper House) to the United Reichstag or Central Parliament at Pesth, of which number five (four elected by the Lower House and one on the part of the Upper House) are delegated to represent the Croatian and Slavonian Diets in the session of the Delegations. At the head of the autonomous Croatian, Slavonian, and Dalmatian Governments is the " Banus " (a dignity answer- ing to the position of provincial or colonial governor), vested with civil authority only, who is appointed by the Emperor-King, with the counter-signature of the Hungarian Prime Minister, but who is responsible for his official acts to the Croatian and Slavonian Diet. Such is in brief the substance of the various enactments by virtue of which the dual regime in Hungary and Austria was established. What an important gain has accrued to the Imperial Austrian State from the compromise effected with Hungary twenty years ago can only be justly estimated by those who recall to mind the bitter animosity which existed for so many years between Hungary and Austria, and the incessant dissensions and protests, accompanied by a stubborn, passive resistance, and the general refusal to pay the taxes levied by the unconstitutional Austrian Government which had not been sanctioned by the Hun- garian Diet, and all the ill-success and the disasters suffered by Austria, which chiefly resulted from this calamitous state of affairs, particularly in connection with the wars with Italy. France, and Prussia. 176 IRELAND. The advantages obtained from having silenced the oppo- sition and removed the causes of the passive resistance of the Hungarian people, by the fulfilment of their aspirations and wishes, have subdued and calmed the scruples of those who apprehended from these concessions, which they re- garded as excessive and too far-reaching, nothing but a disintegrating danger to the integrity and union of the empire. The results have proved that the dangers of a system of free and liberal dualism are far less than a state of con- tinuous discontent and internal war and lawlessness with a nation which is only reluctantly and sullenly bowing its neck under the iron rule of its fancied oppressors, and that the scheme of converting that nation by liberal concessions into an active and useful co-partner in a new order of things was not only a happy and correct one, but also one of beneficial success, provided that this nation was, besides its proved inflexibility and perseverance, possessed of a suffi- ciently high degree of self-restraint and self-abnegation to subordinate, by a moderate and wise use and application of the concessions obtained and the success achieved thereby, their own interests to the higher and imperial interests and the well-being of the whole State. " There can be no doubt that the dual regime has acted beneficially as regards Hungary," since, according to one of her own highest authorities, the present condition of that country is in harmony with the real wants of the nation, the different political parties standing on the firm foundation of loyalty to the Crown, a circumstance which affords a suffi- cient guarantee for the future of the Hungarian State and the indissoluble union of the empire. ( 177 ) STATISTICAL TABLES. PREPARED BY W. LEIGH BERNARD, Burrister-at-la ; Fellow of the Statistical Society of London ; Editor of "Leading Cases decided under ' Tlie Irish Church Acts,' &*c." POPULATION OF THE UNITED KINGDOM From 1700 to 1881 (partly estimated). ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. iREt.AND. TOTAL UNITED Year WALES. (Total area, (Total area, TQ 406 I ^2 (Total area, 20.810.820 KINGDOM. (Total area, Year. 37.3i9> 221 statute acres.) A y>, 10 00 rn IN O^ T? rr 'f 10 vo M Os *> Ct iO " ||| M T? 1-T 'u _ j3 N 10 oo 1 10 TJ- O to M \o 10 S .2 "^ VO vo O in rj- \r> H rt- o^ N o VO OO * ro 3 'fi 1 00 SN 8 \O O ro vo vo O O^ ^f -< vo N r^ ro M 10 C ^J rt ,Q ti/j 'Tn ff 3 1-1 pf i-4* t-T I i PI N .g B ^ r^ ^jQ C/5 z M 3 N N Q 1 w N ij- fO N N O\ O fO N 1^ fO O N vO "* vo OO 10 Jl'l' s- c s "* O 9 o vo" O vo O OO >- ro as a P-c oo 1 0~ N rj- vo O " 10 O 3 I'g g fc 0, 'So ^ ^ ON VO M tx, ON ro OO 00 00 - vq_ vo 1 oJ oo o *o oo O 10 1 sf u-> 00 if vo 1 v^ O ON ro ro ** IN w O S * I h-l - - Q "tf T3 M " ^3 ii C M S 10 N OO H >o OO vo PO VO ON ^ ^ ^t 1O tN, QQ t> PI ^ NN ^ 'T', -1-. I-H 4 w *^ s "1 00 H I 5- ""* ro o ** r>. ON ^ & - - <^ ~ N oo" * g" >o 10 i i2 ~ - C C/3 " Sw " _n ^ rt f e O !/) J w . 1> ii CO rC c/} -rj "3 u "*" S.S S. J 'H "3 " A EQ B ^* c o -d " 4J HH U> ^ rt C g 1 rt -2 C rt V S .2 M S 3 1 ^ G TJ w * P "rt " rt 'e ' c 'C " jC ^^ W V I '5j v flfl c EM t * *S II ! ~ ^ Q M N 2 i8o IRELAND. 1-3 txM IT, Q 00 -^-inr^OOOf^WCO QOOO OIH * *3T X s0 ^"^ S l^OO VO f^ O *^ OCO O N t^. Q 83 " S'ococS ooo?coco"co"o8 oSSaToo'co * puB saao ^?cS8 St^^^o^^^g.S^oT' U O OCO CO IN. IN.CO OO t>. tN. tN, txco OCO CO OO OO t-N tN. ^ -uo N IEJOX 5 pBOjqy OVO lOW HI\O OO M OCO I-" fOQvOM OOO t"N. M w O O OOO COOOOOOOCOOOCOOO OOO OOO CO* b b 3UIOJJ z ? 1 ScHH s 1 iJ He? 1 Si s O Q W OO tN,CO COOOCOOOOOOOO OO CO CO OCO CO 2 O W Ifflillllllll ' S O PUBHODS HHss-^^ScSvl cyJJHil 1 mmmmmmmmm^tmmm mrommroro o fc ol^aSf^clS^OcS 1 S^gvgcSg v g,Sftvo r< iS, < S>^vg N v-v-vgv-fl. vSvS'^^SS sjaotyo ' UBJ M ro M w pBcuqv R 1 2" M N M b O IB IBJOX OOO z PUB 1WI OOO M puBnoos CO vo vo ' S piTB$u P 3 B OOO saaoytJO Hpltf IHI Z ioT^vS^^I ^ S 1 1 K $ A ?HHI. K 8 SI 1 U 1 S vovovo lo^^^Trrorommmm^mroronm Pi U JB ^^^KcSSocfcS a ^. v? 2-cc? ? Sc3 P.K b 1 B 1X b O puBp,! SltySs-s ffSlgHlsf H g g; pUBHOD S CO OO tN. M CO OVO tN. O O M w O OVO OO OO ^* fO fO MMMMManctcinMMM S3I BAV PUB '>gfs|2<|^K.^S > g'g|^ag romm^rommmmmmmmmcTo. " M ^ 10VO t^co M rr < U1VO r^CO M M m TC S COOOOOCOOOOOCOCOCOCOCOOOCOCOCOCOCOCOCOCO > STATISTICAL TABLES. 181 ARMY. Nationalities of the Non-Commissioned Officers and Men on the \st January 1885. 1 Born in Corps of Army Service. English. Scotch. Irish. India or the Foreign- ers. Not reported. Total. Colonies. Household Cavalry 973 178 86 16 i,53 Cavalry of the Line 12,325 1,168 1,492 170 4 "oo 15,219 Royal Artillery 22,546 2,024 5,201 713 50 83 3,6 '7 Royal Engineers . 3,8i3 347 528 119 8 4,8i5 Foot Guards . 4,861 767 344 13 5 2 5,992 Infantry of the Line 78,912 8,938 22,902 i,i59 78 3,301 H5,35o Colonial Corps 24 4 7 2,142 i 21 2,199 Commissariat and Transport Corps . 2,289 141 280 43 4 3,757 Ordnance Store Corps . 458 45 63 16 i 583 Corps of Ordnance Artificers 29 i 3 33 Medical Staff Corps 1,815 in 234 *3 7 2,190 General total 128,045 13,724 3M4 4,4i4 158 3,527 181,008 Proportion per 1000 73 78 178 13 i 1,000 ARMY. Religious Denominations of the Non- Commissioned Officers and Men on the \st January 1885. rf 13 .2 c u C e 8 -n S Corps of Army Service. sl 1| u 81 N Si* u o 06 a oo O O. Total. S PH i O S ^ Household Cavalry i, 080 120 6 47 1,253 Cavalry of the Line 11,704 1,126 625 62 1,641 00 15,219 Royal Artillery 20,924 2,034 1,481 286 5, 61 1 X 81 30,617 Royal Engineers Foot Guards . Infantry of the Line 3,401 4,544 70,409 385 685 8,027 4H 251 4,3 I 5 70 28 409 545 - 482| ... 28,829 2 4,815 5,992 5.35o Colonial Corps Commissariat and 1.033 47 245 181 423 249 21 2,199 Transport Corps . Ordnance Staff Corps i,975 348 '49 41 192 99 84 20 357 75 3,757 583 Corps of Ordnance Artificers 19 33 Medical Staff Corps 1,601 120 123 7' 275 ... 3.190 General total 117,038 "",737 7,762 1,211 38.485 250 3,535 181,008 Proportion per 1000 662 72 43 6 217 1,000 IRELAND. EMIGRATION FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1815-84. Destination of Emigrants. Period. To United States. To British North America. To Australasia. To all other Places. Grand Totals. I8IS-S2 2,064,581 1,036,714 310,836 5I,46l 3,463,592 1853-60 983,625 159,807 397,389 41,654 1,582,475 1861-70 1,424,466 I95> 2 50 280,198 67,656 1,967,570 1871-80 1,531,851 232,213 313,106 151,226 2,228,396 1815-84 7,063,780 1,802,629 1,483,187 399,297 10,748,893 NOTE. The total number of emigrants from Ireland only, to all places, between ist May 1851 and 3ist December 1884, was 2,989,327. NATIONALITY OF EMIGRANTS IN 1853-84. ENGLISH. SCOTCH. IRISH. PERIOD. No. Per- centage No. Per- centage No. Per- centage TOTAL. of of of Total. Total. Total. Three years, 1853-55 211,013 30 62,514 9 421,672 61 6 95,i99 Five years, 1856-60 243,409 39 59,016 10 3 1 5,059 51 617,484 ,, 1861-65 236,838 33 62,461 9 418,497 58 717,796 ,, 1866-70 368,327 43 85,621 400,085 47 854,033 1871-75 545,015 56 95,055 o 329,467 34 969,537 Year 1876 73,396 67 10,097 9 25,976 24 109,469 1877 63,711 67 8,653 9 22,831 24 ' 95,195 1878 64 11,087 o 29,492 26 112,902 1879 W,275 64 18,703 i 41,296 25 164,374 1880 111,845 49 22,056 93,641 1881 139,976 58 26,826 I 76,200 31 243,002 1882 162,992 58 32,242 2 84,132 30 279,366 1883 183,236 57 3 I , I 39 O 105,743 33 320,118 1884 147,660 61 21,953 9 72,566 3 242,179 STATISTICAL TABLES. 183 IMMIGRANTS of British and Irish Origin that landed in tJie United Kingdom from Foreign Countries in each of the Years 1877 to 1884. Country. 1877. 1878. 1879. 1880. 1881. 1882. 1883. 1884. United States . . . British North America Australasia .... Other places .... Total . . . 44,878 5,687 4,637 8,688 34,04 6,204 4,207 10,493 10,048 3,497 4,9 6 7 9,424 26,ei8 4,688 s.g'o 9,891 47,007 29,781 5,76i 5,877 11,288 28,468 6,097 6,871 i3, 2 75 4 6 ,7o3 7,021 6,844 13,236 61,466 8,861 8,312 12,717 63, 890 '$4,944 1 37,936 52,707 54,7" 73,804 9i,3,S6 REMITTANCES by Settlers in the United States and British North America to their Friends in tJie United Kingdom, in each year from 1848 to 1884. Year. Amount. Year. Amount. Year. Amount. 1848 460,000 1861 . . 374,061 1874 . . 485,566 1849 540,000 1862 . . 360,578 1875 354,356 1850 957,000 1863 . . 383,286 1876 . . 449,641 1851 990,000 1864 . . 332,172 1877 667,564 1852 1,404,000 1865 . . 481,580 1878 . . 784,067 1853 i ,439,000 1866 . . 498,028 1879 855,631 1854 1.730.000 1867 . . 543,029 1880 . . ,403 ,341 1855 873,000 1868 . . 530,564 1881 . . ,505,794 1856 951,000 1869 . . 639,335 1882 . . ,573,552 1857 593, 165 1870 . . 727,408 1883 . . ,611,206 1858 472,610 1871 . . 702,488 1884 . . ,575,756 igCQ C2O OIQ 1872 *7/tO flflA ;>y 1860 . 53^476 1873 ' ' /4y uu 4 724,040 Total 29,776,977* * Settlers in Australasia remitted a further sum of ,585,935 in the years 1875-84. 1 84 IRELAND. SETTLERS IN UNITED STATES who, at each of the last four Censuses, were Natives of the United Kingdom. United Census Years. United Kingdom (total). Natives of England. .Vatives of Wales. Natives of Scotland. Natives of Ireland. Kingdom (country not specified). 1850 1,364,986 278,675 29,868 70,550 961,719 24,174 i860 2,224,743 431,692 45,763 108,518 1,611,304 2.7,466 1870 2,626,241 55 ,924 74,533 140,835 1,855,827 4,122 l88o 2,772,169 662,676 83,302 170,136 1,854,571 1,484 THE IRISH GOVERNMENT. I. E xpenses of Viceroyalty of Ireland. Salary of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, chargeable on Consolidated Fund .... .20,000 Salaries of Household. I Private Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, and clerks 829 4 Aides-de-Camp, exclusive of military pay . . . 800 State Steward 506 Comptroller . 414 Gentleman Usher ....... 200 Chamberlain ........ 200 Master of the Horse ....... 200 ' Gentlemen in Waiting ...... 443 Surgeon to the Household . ' . . . . 100 State Porter ........ 62 Sergeant of the Riding-house ..... 30 Telegraphist at Viceregal Lodge . . . .91 Incidental expenses 85 Total expenses of household . . .3,960 STATISTICAL TABLES. 185 Castle Chapel. I Chaplain, including house allowance .... ,335 I Reading Clerk 42 1 Organist, including allowance for six boy choristers . 240 2 Choristers ......... 74 I Keeper of the Chapel 98 Total for Chapel salaries . Salaries and Allowances, Office of Arms, Queen's Plates, 6. I Ulster King at Arms, exclusive of $ per annum as Keeper of State Papers 920* I Athlone Pursuivant of Arms (in lieu of official fees) . 20 I Clerk in Office of Arms 30 I Kettle Drummer's clothing 13 I Porter and Messenger at Record Tower ... 74 i Office Cleaner 30 Incidental expenses 1885-6 for Insignia and Banners of the Order of St. Patrick, emblazoning Arms, &c . 70 QUEEN'S PLATES to he run for in Ireland . . . 1,563 Total, Office of Arms, Queen's Plates, c. . . . 2,720 Pensions and Stationery 410 Total Expenditure 1885-86, exclusive of expenditure l by Board of Public Works for maintenance of> .27,879 State residences, estimated at ^10,091 . . ) - * The total fees and stamps received by the Crown in respect of Office of Arms in 1884-85 was 750. 186 IRELAND. THE IRISH GOVERNMENT Continued. II. Expenses of Department of Chief Secretary to t/ie Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Salary of Chief Secretary ,4,425 Expenses of maintenance of residence, gardens, &c., at Phoenix Park . 1,607 Salary of Under-Secretary 2,500 Expenses of maintenance of house in Dublin Castle . . 198 Expenses of maintenance of residence, demesne, &c., in Phoenix Park r.ooo Two Assistant Under-Secretaries 2,900 Two Principal Clerks . ....... l,75 Nine First-class Clerks 3,406 One Draftsman of Bills 600 Allowances to Private Secretaries 620 Salaries of Junior Clerks, Messengers, &c 3,647 Salaries of servants in London Office 3,io8 Travelling and incidental expenses ..... i99O Maintenance of offices by Board of Works . . . . M74 26,082 III. Summary of Expenses oj Irish Government. Expenses of Viceroyalty 27,879 Maintenance of State Residences ..... 10,091 Expenses of Department of Chief Secretary for Ireland . 26,082 Total expenses of Irish Government 64,052 STATISTICAL TABLES. 187 Q ^ -- Jy OO C> > o e . .S > fovo oe = S.s ) VO M < m o o -1- c u ell 1 88 IRELAND. Q : i- 1 -^ W g - , o : S > o S g HH P(S O -6 SN'^ SJ 1^ oo 1 H"3 M ^f ro ro OO~ I? iT 2" ^? N2" NO NO rx OO NO J^ t! 2 d ON ^ ON NO C\ NO_ ro ro ro u-> - ro N" ^=4 rO NO ON CM rT i. i. t~N. 1-4 ro -" -o 5 oo" uS oo~ cT ^p 6 "2 (M 3 O i. o OO T)- ON ""> O *N^ fcj S^ OO OO N r^ . C3 u fc-al c = ^" ro ^ t ~ t g ^4 1 f? Ss ro O PI 3 P, Nl 0- rC rC ~~ ro N 3 rt B SS& VO tO ^ N f} W O *^O ^ *0 ^ ON ro fa S*tJ*o fvj" Js^ f^J (^) fC -o oS M M M * O 1 -!$ ON ON vQ ^** N O O i^ u-i M B w-^^ O ON ^^ ^* tr> 2 O "^ a o ^ *^l T^ T}~ ON N *s? *-* ^*? ON \O CO >O 7r ^ - VO ON O ON t^ CJ t3 ^* *-O TO 1^ O~ j^ M CO M M *"* -o . M to 00 O 10 ^- oo 10 W vO vO co ro ON NO" S -S CO CO CO rj- ON o -/> tr^ >- OO W Q ON N ON ON 3 OO O O W ii co~ cT rf iA OO~ O ro t*> ^ *O S? CJ en o tj ^ . v. 60 f-t '. V US O M 0, c S S S B '53 = o 2 ij P S U O STATISTICAL TABLES. 189 1 Q 55 e .g ^ s'l s tn u 2 r- C S ~ IQO IRELAND. C/3 g 1-1 p ^ O D U > i F4 O aX 6 3 8 . si ' O.g U o\ o i^ N\O * ro O * \o c* STATISTICAL TABLES. 191 OCCUPATIONS OF PERSONS In the United Kingdom, according to Census of 1881. 20 years and upwards. All Ages. Rate per cent. CLASSES* Males. Females. Males. Females. Total. Males. Fern. ENGLAND AND WALKS : I. Professional 356,722 107,141 450,955 106,120 647,075 3'6 i '4 II. Domestic . 215,621 1,332,504 258,5081 1,545,302 1,803,810 2 '4 ii -6 II. Commercial 723,178 16,633' 960,661 19,467 980,128 7=6 O'2 IV. Agricultural 1,054,195 47,248 1,318,344 64.840 1,383,184 10-4 '5 V. Industrial . 3,893.4' 7 1,128,518 4,795,>78 1,578,189 6,373,367 37'9 I0'2 VI. Indefinite and Unproductive 670,429 853,985 4,856,256 9,930,619 14,786,875 38-1 7 6-I Total . . 6,913,562 3,486,029 12,639,902 13,334,537 25,974,439 IOO' IOO' SCOTLAND : I. Professional 46,136 I3>30 65,499 30,604 96,103 3 '7 1*5 II. Domestic . 2i,549 101,546 25,292 iS',273 176,565 i '4 7'7 [II. Commercial 98,579 1,990 126,743 5,383 132,126 7'o '3 IV. Agricultural I7 2 ,377 38,432 215,215 54,322 269,537 11-9 2'7 V. Industrial . 544,525 172,674 675, Q6.1 256,689 932,653 43'' T 3'o VI. Indefinite and Unproductive 34,680 745,909 690,762 1,437,827 2,128,589 32'9 74-8 Total . . 917,846 1,073,85" 1,799,475 1,936,09? 3,735,573 100' IOC* IRELAND: I. Professional 91,382 20,021 136,485 62,195 198,684 5 '4 2- 3 II. Domestic . 26,072 3'3,3 6 4 34,068 392,093 426,161 ''3 14-8 HI. Commercial 59,663 i, log 7 ,75i i,494 72,245 2'8 O'l IV. Agricultural 757>U2 84,656 902,010 95,946 997>956 35-6 3'6 V. Industrial . 355,877 199,585 428,578 262,931 691,509 i6'9 9'9 VI. Indefinite and Unproductive 47,4'0 845,639 961,381 1,826,900 2,788,281 38*0 69-3 Total . . i,337.5i6 ',464,374 2,533> 2 77 2,641,559 5.174,836 100' IOO" Total, United ) Kingdom / 9,168,924 6,024,254 16,972,654 17,912,194 34,884,848 192 IRELAND. 5 ^ ^ ^ 2" ^ J?> Pt^S vo ^oo'o" o" a d a> * rt SJ ONCO ^^ O "^ to ^- tr> r}-QC OO f^ r^ ? a - N roroN N o >- oo t^ * ON t>.oo HL ^ : : - VO MD~ tC fO tC N" " H.A 00 VO . . ^S^SS^sEIIol * | a z ll kf OO ON r^vO vO W ^'N rovO O "^ *-O i^ n < m u-)00 00 t^ O O ON 1 J w j ~ CM f^rorj- OO u W i g^^lsSS'^s^-^^ ro 3 1 M ro iS. 2, ^ ?r Cr g; ^ % ir & '." O | z - vO rou^f-,r 83 _ O u, "- 1 ci u^ O 13 f 'O S- -d ^ S i- 3 "o H g --28S,K| STATISTICAL TABLES, 193 LANDS HELD IN IRELAND By London City Livery Companies and the Irish Society, according to Doomsday Book, 1876. Name of Company. County in which Lands are situate. . r Govern- Extent of Lands ' Valuation. j Acreage. Drapers' Company . < Meath and London- ) deny . . j 27,588 15,415 Fishmongers' Company Londonderry . | 20,509 9,159 Grocers' Company . ditto 11,638 6,457 Ironmongers' Company ditto 12,714 8,032 Mercer*' Company . ditto 1 21,241 11,740 Sailers' Company . . ditto 19.445 17,263 Skinners' Company . ditto 34.772 9,511 The Hon. the Irish 1 Society ) Donegal, London ) derry, and Tyrone \ 7,641 12,696 Total . . . ! 155,548 90,273 ! NOTE. It is believed that certain of the above lands have been sold to the tenants thereof, but no returns are available from which particulars of such sales could be given. POLICE AND CONSTABULARY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM IN 1884. Strength per Expense. of Force. 10,000 Of Population. R^:, C >-'^- Total. England and Wales. Scotland . . Ireland 34,999 3,962 M,523 '3'5 io'6 28-0 ",353, '45 2,122,855 141,111 21^,240 1,402,752 167,545 3,476,000 354,351 ',570,297 United Kingdom Total. 53,484 '5'3 2,897,008 2,503,640 5,400,648 194 IRELAND. O Q O S5 CO in H C/3 hH H H ^ U .S S A u 1 if CO N \r> * rj| a P 2 > t/j 1 ro 00 ro to M fc -C i/i . rt 2"= c " o. N .fOVO V ^f '? rfl 00 C _ i g 2 O w o OO 'Q 2* .2 c'~ t5 "^ C *--( O 5 JH ^^ /") 3 rn M 10 "^ O 1 1 c ^ S" Annual Nu Convicted. O 00 -4- CO 'C "Q 1> Iff 4) _Q r d ^* pfl 2 ill ON o" if "s u u S o f~* O O) w O c o 1 g P, ... 6 O *, 4J a O -*- CJ) . c jj 2 Si 3 c ... T) 10 o* "H 1 _ 1 ' 8J S is a < o M- n M ro to N .1 , ^ tuQ g B 3 u O O CJ^ ro O *^O ON ro CO t~^ ^J" rt 8*2 |l ON fi ro ON *< CO ^J 1 ON ON TO Z u 1 N P4 w i.'O S u - > CO ON I'N rj- rj- CO vO W t*^ *o ! ^o A"3 IH C JJ a-8 3 --* M M O N M t--, ro ro O ON ^ in rf CO ci *1 s OO 00 CO CO OO 00 CO OO 00 OO > 196 IRELAND. JUDICIAL RENTS IN IRELAND. Result of Proceedings under " The Land Lau> {Ireland) Act, iSSi," in fixing" Fair Rents" in 1881-84. Year. Fair Rents fixed. Per- centage of Reduc- tion. Year. Number. Amount of Judicial Rents. Amount of Former Rents. fj 1881-82 43,726 744,255 925,728 , 19-6 I88I-82 1883 71,971 1,046,735 1,282,848 l8'4 1883 1884 41,743 561,631 674,050 .67 1884 Total, \ 1881-84 j 157,440 2,352,621 2,882,626 18-4 1881-84 BOROUGH RATES IN IRELAND. Eleven cities and towns are liable to the imposition of a Borough Rate viz., Belfast, Clonmel, Cork, Drogheda, Dublin, Kilkenny, Limerick, Londonderry, Siigo, YVaterford, and Wexford, of which the aggregate rateable valuation is about ,1,800,000; and the average receipts and expenditure 750,000, and debt about 2, 500,000. TOWN RATES IN IRELAND. There are 105 towns or local townships in Ireland having Commis- sioners to administer the same, pursuant to Acts of 9 Geo. IV. c. 82, and 17 & 18 Vic. c. 103, or special Ac:s, of which detailed particulars will be found in the Local Taxation (Ireland) Returns presented to Parliament. The average aggregate receipts and disbursements of town authori- ties, so constituted, is about 1,000,000, and debt about ,400,000. STATISTICAL TABLES. 197 CO I o CO co "* 6 I G U g 3 Q W O S ^-> CO b s "^ P X! O O H-l o 3 3 vO N to O ON ^ T}- 10 -H co C*N ^^ OO to ro O ON ON ONOO to rj- ^1- C. X ^H VO to to O O ON S o CM tO ON O VO CM 1 to to to vO vO to ro Tf TJ- VQ vo VO ab>.S "5*5 u O vo ro O M ** 5 i^oo ONOO ^O Tj- CM CM CM CM ON CM ON 1-1 ON I^ CM CM O ON >! 00 Tj- 1-^ O ro 1-1 CM toOO t^ i- OO OO ON O vo to i-< OO O t^ r^ t^ O Ill to to to VO vO vO vO vo vo oo oo r^ CM t^.vO to t^ to Q ON ON * ON O -. OO CM I^ j P)3 %3-g- N fO OO OO OO ao oo oo 1-1 N n 00 OO OO H. CM rt OO OO OO rt _c **" O CM OO OO OO OO OO 00 O CM oo oo oo 00 00 00 Q N GO OO OO J^. S. S^ oo oo oo oo oo oo [rt ' rt e To y c o a ~v 5 i! u 'e 198 IRELAND. CO CO I o Q O O * O w w II i i j 8.1 n 3 1 | CO f> t> vo ON f O i i O CM CNt^r- OO vo O O 'too OO vo O ""> ON ON CM ro CM O CO VO CO ON CM CO vO VO ^ CO !"> CO 1O t^> vO O CO CO O 10 o ^- 1-1 CO lOvO ( J "c t^vO i^ CM 1-1 I-H t^. t^OO ^ t 1 83 "Juouo t^^t-. 1 -1 "O 1 * t^O^J- O'-'CM -t-l^'j- CMOOC1 ON^tlO jo 0^ .- ON O ro O ^** O O CO 10 ON vo !* -< 1O 1^ M X O CO CO t^ CO CM XOCO O VO ON HI H co HH NH ro n ro LO LOVO CM CO 1-1 -~~- J^ 1 ^^ enue. ^ 2^ SvB ^ S} ^ 0. ON l^ ON / om^> NNCO ON O 10 00 VO ON 13 2 OCO OO vovovo CO CO O 1 0" 0" " w M M M M a S? s * ON t^t CO vO ro O '-OVD t->. O vO t^-OO u- ON ^f O i-i rt- (-( CO tx. t^ V) J--.VO t**. ro ^o t^ i-O *-O HN vo f^ ^o (J to ON *-o ON ^1" c^ CO *-o O 1-1 ON O X HHH-tr^O'-'O XJ". U-1VO OO CO CO co co t> i-o ^o u~i ^ ^j~ ^j~ r> f> t*^ CM CM CM s? WOO t^ ON 10 ON vO OO ** 10 n O g ONONfO COCMVO ONtnrO ro u~> co O 1^-* 10 C^ ON O CM vO CO CO < T? en m 1-1 N 3 M H C\ vO (^ t>> ONONQ CO CO t^ vovovo 1-1 M i-i n ff CJN O> O ^ g ooooco coooco oooooo COOO3O COOOCO COCOOO ro ^t" 10 CO 00 OO CO CO CO V to G IU ft c a c t - 1 ^ C8 w E ~ a o ~ _rt O W y! H STATISTICAL TABLES. 199 IMPERIAL EXPENDITURE FOR IRELAND. PROVIDED FOR IN CIVIL SERVICE ESTIMATES AND CONSOLIDATED FUND IN 1885-6. I. Items included in Cii'il Seri'ice Estimates, 1885-6. CLASS 1. Public Works a ttd Buildings. Rates on Government Property .... .32,145 Public Buildings 221,784 Royal University Buildings .... 27,428 Science and Art Buildings (Dublin) . . . 31,000 Total, Class I. . 312,357 CLASS \\.-SalaritsandExpenscs of Tublic Departments. I-ord Lieutenant's Household Chief Secretary's Office .... Charitable Donations and Bequests Office . Local Government Board . . Public Works Office . 7,469 43.382 2,152 139,628 Record Office . . 6 7=;6 Registrar-General's Office .... Valuation and Boundary Survey . 16,126 23,804 Total, Class II. CLASS III. Law and Justice. Law Charges and Criminal Prosecutions . . X>79;2o6 Supreme Court of Judicature .... 91,222 Court of Bankruptcy 10,300 Admiralty Court Registry i>285 Registry of Deeds I 7,5' Registry of Judgments 2,338 Land Commission 78,677 County Court Officers, &c 96,316 Dublin Metropolitan Police (including Police Courts) MS.Si? Constabulary 1,380,091 Prisons, Ireland 158,441 Reformatory and Industrial Schools . . . 101,150 Dundrum Criminal Lunatic Asylum . . . 6,847 Total, Class III. . 2, 1(9,^00 200 IRELAND. IMPERIAL EXPENDITURE FOR IRELAND. Continwd. CLASS IV. Education, Science and Art. Public Education 786,303 Teachers' Pension Office 2,013 Endowed Schools Commissioners . . . 670 National Gallery 2,501 Queen's Colleges ....... 12,628 Royal Irish Academy 2,000 Total, Class IV. . 806,115 CLASS ~V\. Superannuations and Charities, Pauper Lunatics 98,200 Hospitals and Infirmaries 16,747 Miscellaneous Charitable and other Allowances. 2,971 Total, Class VI. . 117,918 Total provided for in Civil Service Estimates .3,701,018 II. Items chargeable to Consolidated Fund, 1884-5. Salary of Lord Lieutenant ..... .20,000 Salaries of Judges of Superior and County Courts . 115, 554 Pensions for Judicial Services .... 21,079 Pensions of Officials of Courts of Justice . . 2,735 Grant to Queen's Colleges ..... 21,470 King's Inn Library, Dublin, under Copyright Act 433 Allowances, under 41 George III. c. 32, to Lord Mayor and Citizens of Dublin . . . . 715 Under-Librarian at Marsh's Library, Dublin . 26 Rent of Ground near Carrickfergus Castle . . 14 Total paid, 1884-5 out of Consolidated Fund Grand total of Imperial Expenditure for Ireland, exclusive of proportion of Army and Navy expenses . 182,026 3.883,044 STATISTICAL TABLES. 201 LOANS FOR PUBLIC WORKS, &c., IN IRELAND. I. Loans made by Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, under the provisions of the Act i and 2 Wm. IV. cap. 33, and subsequent Acts. Total issued to OBJECTS. 3ist March 1885. I. PUIILIC WORKS LOAN Frxn : s. d. For Roads, Court-houses, &c. .... 737,569 7 I To Local Boards for Improvement of Townships 123,550 o o Roads, Bridges, &c. ...... 200,477 4 Inland Navigation Works Improvement . . 69,950 o o Public Buildings, Erection and Completion . . 52,100 o o Railways, in aid of Construction .... 963,239 5 8 In aid of Quarries, Mines, &c. .... 15,283 o o Sundry Harbours, Docks, &c , Construction . . 431,058 6 i Fishery Piers and Harbours ..... 53,279 6 6 Reclamation of Waste Lands . 96,000 o o Labourers' Dwellings in Towns .... 167,592 15 2 Artisans' Dwellings . . - . . . 81,000 o o Glebe Loans ....... 354,947 o o Public Health ....... 1,088,204 J I River Drainage, and Navigation .... 2,082,052 7 3 River Drainage Maintenance .... 39>3i3 10 n River Drainage ..... . 581,390 18 10 Public Woiks Loans ...... 491,444 19 8 Repairs of Roads, Bridges ..... 133,640 16 i Land Improvement, Preliminary Expenses . . 58,500 o o Repairs of Fishery Piers ..... 14,232 9 2 Maintenance of Navigation Works . . . 2,430 o o Gaols and Bridewells ...... 892,758 6 9 Lunatic Asylums Buildings ..... 1,332,378 7 3 Building Schools ....... 10,293 5 7 Relief of Distress . '5>756 o o Seed Supply 647,562 n 10 Emigration ....... 11,675 3 10 Improvement of Lands, 10 Vic. c. 32 : For Drain- age, Farm Buildings, Labourers' Dwellings, Planting for Shelter, Scutch-mills, &c. . . 3, 737.-65' I 5 (Continued nc.vt fn^c.') 202 IRELAND. LOANS FOR PUBLIC WORKS, &.c.- Continued. s. d. National School Teachers' Residences . . 44,879 o o Dispensary Houses 26,928 o o Land Law Act, 44 & 45 Vic. c. 49, s. 31 : Advances to Tenants for Improvements . . 371,271 o o II. LAND ACT FUND, 33 and 34 Vic. c. 46 : Advances to Tenants for purchase of their holdings, authorized 1870-81 518,416 13 o III. IRISH CHURCH FUND ACT, 43 Vic. c. 4, and 43 and 44 Vic. c. 14 : Improvement of Lanus ..... i ; - 9 18,245 17 9 Public Health ^ . 38,535 10 o Baronial Works ^j 271,083 o 10 Relief of Distress 3s 11,383 13 4 Ditto, Grants if 19,069 3 o Arteri.il Drainage si L 6,136 i o Grand total of Loans by Irish Board of Works 16,711,282 19 5 The balance of principal and interest outstanding on 3ist March 1 885 was 7, 53 1, 956. II. Loans made in Ireland by the Public Works Loan Commissioners \ London, under various Acts. OBJECTS. Total Loans to March 3 1, 1 885. Balance, Principal and Interest outstanding March 31, 1885. Harbours ..... Belfast and Co. Down Railway . Railways ..... Do., Temporary Advances . Burial Boards .... Waterworks .... Sewage Utilization . Workhouses .... Total .... 40,850 164,804 2,686,750 159,356 18,678 479,OOO H,035 2,OOO 2,900 72,915 415,995 34,521 967 308,095 1,849 200 3,562,473 837,442 STATISTICAL TABLES. 203 III. LOANS made by the Irish Land Commission, showing the amount advanced by way of Loan under " The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881," and " The Tram- ways and Public Companies (Ireland) Act, 1883." Objects. Total issued to March 31, 1885. Balances Outstanding. Principal. Interest. In Arrear. : Not Due. LAND LAW (IRELAND) ACT, 1 88 1 : s. d. s. d. \ s. d. s. d. For purchases by tenants from their landlords (24th and 35th sections) 181,498 o o 159 8 7 178,518 9 3 149 12 II For purchases by ten- ants from the Land Commission (26th section) . 48,933 o o 298 47.379 9 1 5 19 4 For purchases by per- sons not being the occupying tenants (271(1 section) 245 o o I 13 2 242 15 10 3 19 4 In payment of ar- rears of rent due by tenants (sgth sec- tion) 18,793 10 ii 3<> i 5 1,542 o ii 19 i 4 TRAMWAYS AND PUB- LIcCCMPANIE(lkE- LAND) ACT, 1883 : For purchase of es- tates by public com- panies (i3th sec- tion) . . 42,300 o o 199 12 10 42,300 o o 291,769 10 it 269,982 15 10 178 12 II SUMMARY OF IRISH LOANS. I. By Commissioners of Public Works, Ireland II. By Public Works Loan Commissioners, London III. By Irish Land Commission .... Grand Total 16,711,283 3.502,473 291,769 20,565,525 204 IRELAND. VALUE OF EXPORTS AND IMPORTS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM /// the Three Years ended $\st December 1884. Ports. 1882. 1883. 1884. England and Wales .. Scotland Ireland... 219,569,672 20,876,705 . ! 1,029,785 217,950,777 20,952,830 895,866 211,802,613 20,450,785 771,844 233,025,242 Total Exports 241,467,162 239,799,473 Total Imports .. . 413,019,608 426,891,579 390,018,569 EXPORTS FROM IRELAND OF CATTLE, SHEEP, AND SWINE. Imported from Ireland into Great Britain, as compared with Imports from Foreign Countries. Based on "Annual Statement of the Trade of the United Kingdom," and Privy Council Returns. Year. Oxen, Bulls, and Cows. Calves. Sheep and Lambs. Swine. Number. Number. Number. Number. Numbers from j Ireland ... 1 ( 804 722,581 509,940 644,598 59,693 46,927 71,245 558,404 460,729 533, 2 85 502,906 461,017 456,678 Numbers from | . 882 Foreign Coun- -j 1 883 tries , 1 884 309.359 427,694 371,010 34,34 47,056 54,497 1,124,391 1,116,115 945,042 15,670 38,863 26,437 Value-Irish Im- fi f g 2 P rts t 88 4 15,354,846 10,868,009 13,915,247 280,059 218,993 336,632 1,270,369 1,036,640 1,213,223 1,846,083 1,613,560 2,294,807 Value Foreign (' *f Imports ... \ 8g 3 6,573,878 9,112,723 8,013,426 161,112 219,519 257,594 2,557,99 2,518,382 2,149,704 57,521 133,130 84,153 STATISTICAL TABLES. 205 AVERAGE VALUE PER HEAD OF LIVE CATTLE, SHEEP, AND PIGS, Imported into the United Kingdom from Foreign Countries and British Possessions, in each of undermentioned years. Cattle. Years. Oxen and Bulls. Cows. Calves. (including Lambs.) Pigs. *. 't- s. d. * * J. 2jS.- 30;. Price of bread per Ib. Ikd. l\d. ikd. ,, .meat 3i 5* 9 d. ,, butter ,, dd. IS. is. &/. Wages, agricultural la- bourers, per week 75. y. <)s. Id. 14-r. Rent of labourer's cot- tage, per week . .. . Set. is. $d. 2S. VALUATION OF PROPERTY By Rating Authorities in England, Scotland, and Ireland at undermentioned periods. Year 1877. Year 1881. Year 1885. England and Wales, ) estimated rental ( 146,995,016 165,143,300 169,835,285 Scotland, valuation 21,846,839 22,689,000 23,559,870 Ireland, valuation 13,619,516 13,766,600 13,883,972 STATISTICAL TA8LES. 20? AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE IN IRELAND. Prices at undermentioned periods, according to Acts of Parliament, drc. Prices per cwt. of 112 Ibs. 1 rooucc. Acts of 1826, . , p. 1836, and .846. j Act of l8 ' 2 - Proposed Act of 1877. i s. d. s. J. S. d. Wheat .... 10 7 6 10 Oats . . . . 60 4 10 7 8 Barley .... 76 5 6 S 4 Butter .... 69 o . 65 4 121 4 Beef .... 33 o 35 6 70 o Mutton 34 6 41 o 74 8 Pork .... 25 6 32 o 51 4 Flax .... 49 o 60 o NOTE. The prices in Act of 1852 were the basis of the valuation known as "Griffith's Valuation." AVERAGE PRICES OF LIVE STOCK IN IRELAND At undermentioned periods. Prices. Prices. Description of Stock. Census Estimate, 1841. Royal Dublin Society's Estimate, 1876. * '/ Horses .... 8oO 22 Horned cattle 6 IO O S to 18 Sheep ..... 120 30^. to 50.5-. Pigs ' 5 o 5'- ^ ^5 2o8 IRELAND. IRISH CHURCH SURPLUS. [32 and 33 Viet. cap. 42.] Estimated value of Property of Disestablished Church of Ireland, about ,17,500,000 Compensations paid for Clerical and other interests in connection with Disestablished Church, and estimated value of outstanding interests, about ; 10,500,000 Approximate surplus .7,000,000 The surplus has been appropriated in the following manner, mainly in relief of payments out of Imperial Exchequer : Compensation to Royal College of St. Patrick's, Maynooth, being 14 years' purchase of grant paid up to 1870, out of Consolidated Fund of United Kingdom* .... ,372,331 Compensation to Presbyterian and other Nonconforrning Bodies in Ireland for loss, in 1870, of grant by Parliament of "The Regium Donum," first granted in 1672 by Charles the Second, amounting to about ,38,000 per annum* 7o,ooo Intermediate Education Grant of 1878, producing ,32, 500 per annum ........... 1,000,000 Pension Fund for National School Teachers, granted 1879, producing .39,000 per annum 1,300,000 Grants sanctioned under Relief of Distress Acts, 1880, repayable by terminable annuities, of which amount required is believed to be under ,i,3oo,ooot . . 1,500,000 Grant of ,20,000 per annum in 1881, as an endowment for Royal University of Ireland, capital value, aboutj Grants under Arrears of Rent (Ireland) Act, 1882, about Sea Fisheries grants ........ Grants to distressed Unions, say Total grants Estimated net unappropriated surplus, exclusive of sums repay- able in respect of loans under Relief of Distress Acts, &c. ^267,169 * The aggregate saving to the Imperial Exchequer during the years 1870-85, by the abolition of the " Maynooth " and " Regium Donum " fifteen years 1870-85, by the abolition of the " JHaynooth " and " Regium Donum " grants, has been estimated at about one million sterling. t It has been estimated that, owing to the special terms as to interest on these grants, there will be an ultimate loss of about ^500,000 to the surplus by Relief of Distress Acts. t The parliamentary grant for the Queen's University in Ireland, super- seded by the Royal University in 1882, was about .5,000 per annum. STA TISTICAL TA BLES. c/ U C/3 t i H H CO PS O h" U W J W P4 H Z - < i i *J e^ H U H fe H U (* H PH W _3 W Q W ftj W H C/3 t i O 1 1 ss ^j .-, 3 M CO M 5% ' .-888 5 to *^ & ~ 'w jrt ^2 C s'S'g 210 IRELAND. U I I H w | W " u ."^ 1 Q ". <; O3 HH M s 1 i M 5? hJ o ' < & O 55 Q W I & $ H U H O <3 s_ ^ S H U >4 M C/} 1 6* 'I 1^ s Q O S <, g i-^ hH ^ S ^-* ^^ s*^ ^ <1 ^ 16 ^*H ^ O &> V f,vj >< u t ^S f^ < p^ ^k R H w 5 ^ Z W S C/3 3 O a 8 vT > O | H UJ fco I ( S. fc O o S <3 J~ Tj- 10 ro * DON u-, 2 \0~ o Jl i V e tf) _ <<-) oo io o OO ON M s o co !* t"* od "o u M I* IN i-< e o 5 2 2 > > o M M M Or o ro f) - ^ e t^ OO rf "S ^i" OO W o rt ff ~ pT 3 ir> ir> IO O. O PH M M, - a ^ op 1 *' b ; 2 JJJJ! O ON ^O 10 2-s U O fO t~. k y a a v 8*0 OO NH 1% 1 J 10 OO ? "B C\ t--. O o VO 1 fc : oo^ VD OO tj * ro O OO t: 3 O N ' C? fe J & 5 : 3 V s "3 o .2 ^ tfl c c M 2 "fi *C T3 1) o u rt rt C 1 fl s| 1 M 0) ij w & o W C ui i- O s rs g 1 o rt ^> M t-H O e u-. ex ^ =. rt 5? " *. A; o-s W2 S "n? !rt r .= 1 6| 8 ^2 S c STATISTICAL TABLES. 211 ESTIMATED NUMBER OF ELECTORS OF UNCONTESTED CONSTITUENCIES. Parties. Electors, England and Wales. Electors, Scotland. 1 Electors, Ireland. Members returned unopposed. Liberals 63,000 1 30,300 14 Conservatives 23,800 6,400 23,500 10 Nationalists . 133,400 20 Total . 86,800 36,700 156,900 44 AVERAGE PRICES REALIZED FROM SALES OF IRISH ESTATES, With Parliamentary Title, in Land Judges' Courts, Dublin. 1865-68 1869-74 1875-77 1878-80 1881-83 1884 Years' Years' Years' Years' Years' Years' purchase. purchase. purchase. purchase. purchase. purchase 2l| 2lJ 20$ 177 I5-8 19-8 NOTE. The highest average of 23^ years' purchase on net rentab was attained in the year 1871 ; and the lowest, 14-9 years' purchase, in 1883. fRINTF.U I!Y liAI.I.ANTVNK, HANSON ANI> (JO. LONDON A.- i) I.MN; i K'.M UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. FormL9 15wt-10,'48(B1039)444 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY A 001 238 532 4