of restricted self-government for Ireland, and in the debates on Mr.
Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill of 1886, when the condition of Ireland
was far worse than in 1893, had declared himself ready to give that
country a Constitution similar to that enjoyed by Quebec or Ontario
within the Dominion of Canada. But politics are politics. Under the
inexorable laws of the party game, politicians are advocates and swell
their indictments with every count which will bear the light. The system
works well enough in every case but one--the indictment of a
fellow-nation for incapacity to rule itself. There, both in Ireland and
everywhere else, as I shall show, it works incalculable mischief. Once
committed irrevocably to the opposition of Mr. Gladstone's Bills, Mr.
Chamberlain, standing on Imperial ground, which seemed to him and his
followers firm enough then, used his unrivalled debating powers to
traduce and exasperate the Irish people and their leaders by every
device in his power.

One other point survives in its integrity from the case made by Mr.
Chamberlain in 1893, and that is the argument about distance. Clearly
this is a quite distinct contention from the last; for distance from any
given point does not by itself radically alter human nature. Australians
are not twice as good or twice as bad as South Africans because they
are twice as far from the Mother Country. "Does anybody doubt"--let me
repeat his words--"that if Ireland were a thousand miles from England
she would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" The
whole tragedy of Ireland lies in that "if"; but the condition is,
without doubt, still unsatisfied. Ireland is still only sixty miles away
from the English shores, and the argument from proximity, for what it is
worth, is still plausible. To a vast number of minds it still seems
conclusive. Put the South African parallel to the average moderate
Unionist, half disposed to admit the force of this analogy, he would
nevertheless answer: "Ah, but Ireland is so near." Well, let us join
issue on the two grounds I have indicated--the ground of Irish
abnormality, and the ground of Ireland's proximity. It will be found, I
think, that neither contention is tenable by itself; that a supporter of
one unconsciously or consciously reinforces it by reference to the
other, and that to refute one is to refute both. It will be found, too,
that, apart from mechanical and unessential difficulties, the whole case
against Home Rule is included and summed up in these two contentions,
and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly eased and
illuminated by their refutation.


II.

Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish Channel--if
only every Englishman could realize their tremendous significance in
Anglo-Irish history--what an ineffectual barrier "in the long result of
time" to colonization and conquest; what an impassable barrier--through
the ignorance and perversity of British statesmanship--to sympathy and
racial fusion!

For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance from Europe
gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, and freedom to work out her
own destiny. She never, for good or ill, underwent Roman occupation or
Teutonic invasion. She was secure enough to construct and maintain
unimpaired a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous, and
marvellously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture. She
produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle scholars and
divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians. She had a
passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years sent
her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and wide
over Europe. For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign
invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have absorbed
into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately retained a
footing on her eastern shores.

With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century
the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the first time the Irish Channel
assumes its tragic significance. England, compounded of Britons,
Teutons, Danes, Scandinavians, Normans, with the indelible impress of
Rome upon the whole, had emerged, under Nature's mysterious alchemy, a
strong State. Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her tribal
organization, her national culture, but at the cost of falling behind in
the march of political and military organization. Sixty miles divided
her from the nearest part of the outlying dominions of feudal England,
150 miles from the dynamic centre of English power. The degree of
distance seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in
correspondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two
countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst possible
effects on both. The process was slow. Ireland was near enough to
attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers and colonists, but strong enough
and fair enough for three hundred years to transform them into patriots
"more Irish than the Irish"; always, however, too near and too weak,
even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of English rule
from the foothold they had obtained on her shores, while at the same
time too far and too formidable to enable that rule to expand into the
complete conquest and subjugation of the realm.

"The English rule," says Mr. Lecky, "as a living reality, was confined
and concentrated within the limits of the Pale. The hostile power
planted in the heart of the nation destroyed all possibility of central
government, while it was itself incapable of fulfilling that function.
Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, it inflamed all around it
and deranged every vital function. It prevented the gradual reduction
of the island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have taken
place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead of that peaceful
and almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, and languages,
which took place in England, and which is the source of many of the best
elements in English life and character, the two nations remained in
Ireland for centuries in hostility."

From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the
English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It
was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible
to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws
for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland,
even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a
Protestant race and a race exclusively and immovably Catholic. It was in
origin a political antipathy between a small official minority, backed
by the support of a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy
over a large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal
feuds, but on the whole united in loathing and combating that
ascendancy. Universal experience, as I shall afterwards show, proves
that an enmity so engendered takes a more monstrous and degrading shape
than any other. Religion becomes its pretext. Ignorance makes it easy,
and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages
outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and
treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and becomes a permanent
political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act
on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its
consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness
of the dominant race. If left to themselves, white races, of diverse
nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually coalesce, or
at least learn to live together peaceably. But if an external power too
remote to feel genuine responsibility for the welfare of the
inhabitants, while near enough to exert its military power on them,
takes sides in favour of the minority, and employs them as its permanent
and privileged garrison, the results are fatal to the peace and
prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly
harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was
with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history
what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any
transient phase of wise and tolerant government.

Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.,
when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some
semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and
when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by
conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and
land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs.
The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to
be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the
"planting" of English and Scotch settlers.

Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn
into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion. Adventurous and
ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh
regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided
colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of
America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century
no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in
Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as early
as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out
in Munster within the same century. But from the reign of James I.
onward, the two processes advance _pari passu_. Virginia, first founded
by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the
confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620,
just after that huge measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers
landed in New Plymouth. Puritan Massachusetts--with its offshoots,
Connecticut, New Haven and Rhode Island--as well as Catholic Maryland,
were formally established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a
period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic
religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy
Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, with its fierce
excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united
Colonies of New England banded themselves together for mutual defence.

A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the
extermination of the Irish race, with the savage watchword "To Hell or
Connaught," planted Ulster, Munster, and Leinster with men of the same
stock, stamp, and ideas as the colonists of New England, and in the
first years of the Restoration Charles II. confirmed these
confiscations, at the same time that he granted Carolina to Lord
Clarendon, New Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey to Lord
Berkeley, and issued fresh Charters for Connecticut and Maryland.
Finally, Quaker Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682, and in 1691 William
III., after the hopeless Jacobite insurrections in favour of the last of
the Stuarts, wrung the last million acres of good Irish land from the
old Catholic proprietors, planted them with Protestant Englishmen, and
completed the colonization of Ireland. Forty years passed (1733) before
Georgia, the last of the "Old Thirteen Colonies," was planted, as Ulster
had been planted, mainly by Scotch Presbyterians.

During the greater part of this period we must remember that conquered
Ireland herself was contributing to the colonization of America. Every
successive act of spoliation drove Catholic Irishmen across the Atlantic
as well as into Europe, and gave every Colony an infusion of Irish
blood. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century this class of
emigration was for the most part involuntary. Cromwell, for example,
shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West Indies
and America for sale, as "servants" to the colonists. The only organized
and voluntary expedition in which Irish Catholics took part was that to
Maryland under Lord Baltimore. The distinction in course of time became
immaterial. In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became
one people, with a common political and social tradition.

It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish question,
indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics and progress of
the American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to observe the
profound effects of geographical position and political institutions on
human character. I shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the
comparison the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa
by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement.

Let us note, first, that both in America and Ireland the Colonies were
bi-racial, with this all-important distinction, that in America the
native race was coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic, incapable of fusion
with the whites, and, in relation to the almost illimitable territory
colonized, not numerous; while in Ireland the native race was white,
civilized, Christian, numerous, and confined within the limits of a
small island to which it was passionately attached by treasured national
traditions, and whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and revered
system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this respect, is slight,
and becomes insignificant, except in regard to the similarity of the
mental attitude of the colonists towards Indians and Irish respectively.
In natural humanity the colonists of Ireland and the colonists of
America differed in no appreciable degree. They were the same men, with
the same inherent virtues and defects, acting according to the pressure
of environment. Danger, in proportionate degree, made both classes
brutal and perfidious; but in America, though there were moments of
sharp crisis, as in 1675 on the borders of Massachusetts, the degree was
comparatively small, and through the defeat and extrusion of the Indians
diminished steadily. In Ireland, because complete expulsion and
extermination were impossible, the degree was originally great, and,
long after it had actually disappeared, haunted the imagination and
distorted the policy of the invading nation.

In America there was no land question. Freeholds were plentiful for the
meanest settlers and the title was sound and indisputable. In the
"proprietary" Colonies, it is true, vast tracts of country were
originally vested by royal grants in a single nobleman or a group of
capitalists, just as vast estates were granted in Ireland to peers,
London companies, and syndicates of "undertakers"; but by the nature of
things, the extent of territory, its distance, and the absence of a
white subject race, no agrarian harm resulted in America, and a healthy
system of tenure, almost exclusively freehold, was naturally evolved.

In Ireland the land question was the whole question from the first. If
the natives had been exterminated, or their remnants wholly confined,
as Cromwell planned, to the barren lands of Connaught, all might have
been well for the conquerors. Or if Ireland had been, in Mr.
Chamberlain's phrase, a thousand miles away, all might have come right
under the compulsion of circumstances and the healing influence of time.
That the Celtic race still possessed its strong powers of assimilation
was shown by the almost complete denationalization and absorption of a
large number of Cromwell's soldier-colonists in the south and south-east
under what Mr. Lecky calls the "invincible Catholicism" of the Irish
women. But the Irish were not only numerous, but fatally near the seat
of Empire. The natives--Irish or Anglo-Irish--were still more than twice
as numerous as the colonists; they were scattered over the whole
country, barren or fertile, and that country was within a day's sail of
England. The titles of the colonists to the land rested on sheer
violence, sometimes aggravated by the grossest meanness and treachery,
and these titles were not recognized by the plundered race. Even with
their gradual recognition it would have been difficult to introduce the
English system of tenure, which was radically different and repellent to
the Irish mind. The bare idea of one man absolutely owning land and
transmitting it entire to his heirs was incomprehensible to them.

The solution for all these difficulties was unfortunately only too easy
and obvious. England was near, strong, and thoroughly imbued with the
policy of governing Ireland on the principle of antagonizing the races
within her. It was possible, therefore, by English help, under laws made
in England, to constitute the Irish outlaws from the land, labourers on
it, no doubt, that was an economic necessity, precarious occupiers of
plots just sufficient to support life; but, in the eyes of the law,
serfs. The planters of the southern American Colonies imported African
negroes for the same purpose, with irretrievably mischievous results to
their own descendants. Nor is it an exaggeration to compare the use made
of the Irish for a certain period to the use made of these negroes, for
great numbers of the Irish were actually exported as slaves to
Barbadoes, Jamaica, and even to Carolina.

The outlawed multitude in Ireland were deprived, not only of all rights
to the land, but, as a corollary, of all social privileges whatsoever.
"The law," said an Irish Lord Chancellor, "does not suppose any such
person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." The instrument of ostracism
was the famous Penal Code, begun in William's reign in direct and
immediate defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick,
guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and perfected in
the reign of Anne. This Code, ostensibly framed to extirpate
Catholicism, was primarily designed to confirm and perpetuate the
gigantic dislocation of property caused by the transference of Irish and
Anglo-Irish land into English and Scotch ownership. Since the rightful
owners were Catholic, and the wrongful owners Protestants, the laws
against the Catholic religion--a religion feared everywhere by
Englishmen at this period--were the simplest means of legalizing and
buttressing the new regime. I shall not linger over the details of the
Code. Burke's description of it remains classic and unquestioned: "A
complete system full of coherence and consistency, well digested and
composed in all its parts ... a machine of wise and elaborate
contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature
itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."

The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and
impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws against priests,
worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I
need not speak. In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments
concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it
for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made
profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created and sustained
the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land
problem. It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy
years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for
sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet
deep. Long before this the distribution of landed property and the
system of land tenure had become stereotyped.

This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed on the face
of the globe. It has been matched in portions of India, but nowhere
else in this Empire save in little Prince Edward Island, where we shall
meet with it again. In Ireland, where it assumed its worst form, violent
conquest by a neighbouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the
old owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional English
tenures, even into the relations between the British superior landlord
and the British occupying colonist. The bulk of the confiscated Irish
land, as I have mentioned, had been granted in fee to English noblemen,
gentlemen, or speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class
tenants. A number of Cromwell's private soldiers settled in Leinster and
Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an exception to this
rule. But the greater part of Ireland, in ownership, as distinguished
from occupation, consisted of big estates, and a large number of the
English owners, being only a day's sail from England, became, by natural
instinct, habitual absentees. Others lived in Dublin and neglected their
estates. Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland the
proportions of an enormous economic evil. In England the landlord was,
and remains, a capitalist, providing a house and a fully equipped farm
to the tenant. In Ireland he was a rent receiver pure and simple,
unconnected with the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic.
The rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who
contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and had to extract
that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the occupiers, whether
Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, and usually did so by
subdivision of holdings and disproportionate elevation of rents. Over
three of the four Provinces of Ireland--for a small part of Ulster was
differently situated--the middleman himself frequently became an
absentee and farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further
subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who,
in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until the land in many
cases was "subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator
of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation,
beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually
forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican
Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the
hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper
class--though we must allow for many honourable exceptions--was the
Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices
of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the
worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The
slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar
faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over
human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and
subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial
deterioration in the former. In Ireland the ethnological difference was
small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse
proportion.

For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies
of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will,
were alike in certain fundamental characteristics. The tenant had
neither security of tenure nor right to the value of the improvements
which were invariably made by his own capital and labour. Even a
leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to
renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the
farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and
penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other
hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case,
though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the
lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse.
Obviously, in a case where the landlord was neither the capitalist nor
the protector and friend of the tenant, the possession of those
elementary rights, security of tenure and compensation for improvements,
was the condition precedent to the growth of a sound agrarian system.
Their denial was incompatible with social order. Yet they were denied,
and for one hundred and eighty years an intermittent struggle to obtain
them by violence and criminal conspiracy degraded and retarded Ireland.

But a marked distinction grew up between a small portion of Ireland and
the rest. James I.'s plantation of Ulster had been far more drastic and
thorough than any operation of the kind before or since. Later
immigrants had flowed in, and at the beginning of the eighteenth
century in the north-eastern portion--the predominantly Protestant
Ulster of to-day--Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were
thickly settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and
tenacious temper. In the original leases granted by the concessionaires
in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was implied, and a nominal
rent levied, somewhat after the American model; but under the example of
other Provinces, and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the
Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been almost wholly
obliterated. The absentee landlords, reckless of social welfare, exacted
the rack or competitive rent. As in the south and west, tithes to the
Established Church and oppressive and corrupt local taxation for roads
and other purposes, aggravated the discontent. For agrarian reasons
only--and there were others which I shall mention--many thousands of
Protestants left Ireland for ever. It required a long period of outrage
and conspiracy, attaining in 1770 the proportions of a small civil war,
and at the end of the century, by the anti-Catholic passions it
inspired, wrecking new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to
be known as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right. If Protestant freemen had
to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and then only after
irreparable damage to Ireland, the first condition of social stability,
a tolerable land system, the effect of the agrarian system on Catholic
Ireland, prostrate under the Penal Code, may be easily imagined.

In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and excessive tithes,
rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, unknown in the vast and
thinly populated tracts of America intensified the misery of the Irish
peasantry of the eighteenth century. This was the conversion of the best
land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and
migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. Lecky quotes
a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the "best arable land in the
kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few
individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and
streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change
from arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run a
healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England and Scotland
included, though temporarily a fruitful source of misery. Under normal
conditions the immediate evils right themselves in course of time.
Nothing was normal in Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the
outside world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which
produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the wealth of the
kingdom. Under an accumulation of hardships famine was periodic, and
from 1760, when the first Whiteboys appeared, disorder in one degree or
another was chronic. The motive, it is universally agreed now, was
material, not religious. The Whiteboys of the south and west were the
counterparts of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and
even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as Catholic
Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this
now well-ascertained fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the
cause of the disorders. "The real causes," he said, "were ... exorbitant
rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by
their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers,
by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate
oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the
wretched starvers upon potatoes and water; taxes yearly increasing, and
still more tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit,
unwillingly pays in addition to his priest's money ... misery,
oppression, and famine."[6]

Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of secret
societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth century; Terry
Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moonlighters, in the nineteenth,
was rampant for nearly two centuries, long surviving the repeal of the
Penal Code; and its last echoes may be heard at this moment. In the
absence of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means of
self-defence. The remedy applied was retaliatory violence under forms of
law. Nothing whatsoever was done to remove the essential vices of
agrarian tenure during the eighteenth century; nothing tentative even
during the nineteenth century until the year 1870; nothing effective and
permanent until 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought
to give direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the
addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent. Englishmen should
realize this when they discuss Irish character. It is a very old story,
but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking vaguely of Irish
discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, or have never learnt,
this and other fundamental facts. As for the Irish landlords, we must
remember that the founders of that class differed in no respect from
other English landlords, or from the aristocratic American
concessionaires, just as their compatriot tenants and lessees were
identical in stock with the American colonists. Their descendants and
successors have been the victims of circumstance. Each generation has
inherited the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human
nature to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which
created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them. Doubly victimized
have been those resident landlords who at all periods, from the earliest
era of colonization, in spite of temptation and bad examples around
them, have acted towards their tenantry as humane and patriotic
citizens. A bad agrarian system infects the whole body politic. Good
landlords and contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest.

In commerce and industry, as in land, the Irish Colony stood at a heavy
disadvantage by comparison with America. From the Restoration onward,
English statesmen took the same view of both dependencies, namely, that
their commercial interests should be wholly subordinate to those of the
Mother Country, and the same Department, the Board of Trade and
Plantations, made the fiscal regulations for Ireland and America. The
old idea that for trade purposes Ireland counted as an integral part of
the United Kingdom did not last longer than 1663. But it was not wholly
abrogated by the great Navigation Act of that year, which, though it
placed harsh restrictions on the Irish cattle trade with England, did
not expressly exclude Irish ships from the monopoly of the colonial
trade conferred upon English vessels, so that for seven years longer a
tolerably prosperous business was carried on direct between Ireland and
the American Colonies.[7] An Act of 1670, prohibiting, with a few
negligible exceptions, all direct imports from the Colonies into
Ireland, gave a heavy check to this business, arrested the growth of
Irish shipping, and, in conjunction with subsequent measures of
navigational, fiscal, and industrial repression, converted Ireland for a
century into a kind of trade helot. She was treated either as a foreign
country, as a Colony, or as something inferior to either, according to
the dictation of English interests, while possessing neither the
commercial independence of a foreign country nor the natural and
indefeasible immunity which distance, climate, variety of soil, and
unlimited room for expansion continued to confer, in spite of all
coercive restraints, upon the American Colonies. Though the British
trade monopoly was certainly a contributory cause in promoting the
American revolution, it was never, any more than the British claim to
tax, a severe practical grievance. The prohibition of the export of
manufactures, and the compulsory reciprocal exchange of colonial natural
products for British manufactured goods and the chartered merchandise of
the Orient, were not very onerous restrictions for young communities
settled in virgin soil; nor, with a few exceptions like raw wool, whose
export was forbidden, were the American natural products of a kind which
could compete with those of the Mother Country. The real damage
inflicted upon the Colonies by the mercantile system--one which its
modern defenders are apt to forget--was moral. To practise and condone
smuggling was habitual in America, and some of the English Governors set
the worst example of all by making a profit out of connivance at the
illicit traffic. "Graft" was their creation. The moral mischief done was
permanent, and it resembled in a lesser degree the mischief done in
Ireland both by bad agrarian and bad commercial laws. Ireland, owing to
her proximity, was in the unhappy position of being a competitor in the
great staples of trade, both raw and manufactured, and she was near
enough and weak enough to render it easy to stamp out this competition
so far as it was thought to be inimical to English interests. The cattle
and provision trade with England had been damaged as far back as 1663,
and was killed in 1666, though the export of provisions to foreign
countries survived, and became almost the sole source of Irish trade
during the eighteenth century. The policy with raw wool was to admit
just as much as would satisfy the English weavers without arousing the
determined opposition of the competitive English graziers. The Irish
manufactured wool trade, a flourishing business, for which Irishmen
showed exceptionally high aptitude, and which in the normal course of
things would probably have become her staple industry, was destroyed
altogether, avowedly in the interests of the English staple industry, by
prohibitory export duties imposed in 1698. Subsidiary
industries--cotton, glass, brewing, sugar-refining, sail-cloth, hempen
rope, and salt--were successively strangled. One manufacture alone, that
of linen, centred in the Protestant North, was spared, and for a short
period was even encouraged, not because it was a Protestant industry,
but because at first it aroused no trade jealousy in England, and was in
some respects serviceable to her. In 1708, when it was proposed to
extend the industry to Leinster, considerations of foreign trade
provoked an outburst of hostility, and harassing restrictions were
imposed on this industry also. On the whole, however, it suffered less
than the rest, and lived to become one of the two important
manufacturing industries of present-day Ireland.

English policy was as fatuous as it was cruel. Numbers of the Irish
manufacturers and artisans, both Catholic and Protestant, emigrated to
Europe, and devoted their skill and energy to strengthening industries
which competed with those of England. Within Ireland, since industry and
commerce formed the one outlet left by the Penal Code for Catholic
brains and capital--though even here the Code imposed harassing
disabilities--the commercial restrictions completed the ruin of the
proscribed sect. But at this period the main source of weakness to
Ireland, of strength to America, and of danger to the Empire as a whole,
was the Protestant emigration. Lecky estimates that 12,000 Protestant
families in Dublin and 30,000 in the rest of the country were ruined by
the suppression of the wool trade. The great majority of these
Protestants were Presbyterians belonging to North-East Ulster, and
descendants of the men who had defended that Province with such
desperate gallantry against the Irish insurgents under the deposed James
II. Political power in Ireland was wielded in the interests of a small
territorial and Episcopalian aristocracy, largely absentee. The
Dissenters belonged to the middle and lower classes, and were for the
most part tenants or artisans. Creed and caste antipathies were combined
against them. Their value as citizens was ignored. Though their right to
worship was legally recognized by an Act of 1719, they remained from
1704 to 1778 subject to the Test, were incapacitated for all public
employment, and were forbidden to open schools. Under an accumulation of
agrarian, economic, and religious disabilities, they naturally left
Ireland to find freedom in America. And it is beyond question that they
turned the scale against the British arms in the great War of
Independence.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Class C. in Sir William Anson's classification, "Law and Custom of
the Constitution," p. 253.

[5] J. Fisher, "End of the Irish Parliament" cited.

[6] MS. Autobiography cited by Lecky, vol. ii., p. 35.

[7] The best modern account of the commercial relations of Great Britain
Mid Ireland is Miss Murray's "Commercial Relations between England and
Ireland."




CHAPTER II

REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND


In the Old World and in the New, therefore, two societies, composed of
human beings similar in all essential respects, were growing up under
the protection of the British Crown; the one servile, the other free;
the one stagnant where it was not retrograde, the other prosperous,
progressive, and, by the magnetism of its own freedom, progress, and
prosperity, steadily draining its Irish fellow of talent, energy, and
industrial skill.

What was the ultimate cause of this glaring divergency? Religion, as a
spiritual force, was not the root cause. The American Colonies, with
three exceptions--the earliest Virginia, the latest Georgia, and the
Catholic community of Maryland--were formed by Dissenters,[8] exiles
themselves from persecution, but not necessarily forbearing to others,
and, in the case of the New England Puritans, bitterly intolerant. It is
interesting to observe that the Quakers and the Catholics, men standing
at the opposite poles of theology, set the highest example of tolerance.
Quaker Pennsylvania enforced absolute liberty of conscience, and Quakers
in all the Provinces worked for religious harmony and freedom. Catholic
Maryland, as long as its government remained in Catholic hands, and
under the guidance of the wise and liberal Proprietary, Lord Baltimore,
pursued the same policy, and attracted members of sects persecuted in
New England.[9] The parallel with Ireland is significant. At the end of
the seventeenth century, when a quarrel was raging between the Crown and
Massachusetts over the persecution of Quakers in that Colony, and for a
further period in the eighteenth century, Quaker missionaries and
settlers were conducting a campaign of revivalism in Ireland with no
molestation from the Catholics, though with intermittent obstruction
from magistrates and Protestant clergy. Wesleyans received the same
sympathetic treatment.[10] The tolerance shown by Irish Catholics, in
spite of terrible provocation, is acknowledged by all reputable
historians. Nor was Protestant intolerance, whether Anglican or
Nonconformist, of a deeper dogmatic shade than anywhere else in the
King's dominions. But in Ireland it was political, economic, and social,
while in America it was purely theological, and, moreover, purely
American. The Episcopalian ascendancy in Ireland represented foreign
interests, and therefore struck against Dissent as well as against
Popery, and estranged both. The root of the American trouble, leading to
the separation of the Colonies, was political and wholly unconnected
with religion. The root of the Irish trouble, adventitiously connected
with religion, lay, and lies still, in the Irish political system. Other
evils were transient and curable; this was permanent. The Penal Code was
eventually relaxed; the disabilities of the Dissenters were eventually
removed; the commercial servitude was abolished, but the political
system _in essentials_ has never been changed. Let us see what it was
and how it worked at the period we are considering, again by comparison
with America.

Though the word "plantation" was applied alike to the colonization of
Ireland and America, Ireland was never called a Colony, but a Kingdom.
The distinction was not scientific, and operated, like all other
distinctions, to the injury of Ireland. Neither country was represented
in the British Parliament. In both countries the representatives of the
Crown were appointed by England, and controlled, in America almost
completely, in Ireland absolutely, the Executive and Judges. In Ireland
the Viceroy was always an Englishman; in America, the Governors of a few
of the non-proprietary Colonies were colonials, but most Governors were
English, and some of the proprietary class were absentees.[11] In the
case both of Ireland and America the English Government claimed a
superior right of control over legislation and taxation, and in both
cases it was found necessary to remove all doubts as to this right by
passing Declaratory Acts, for Ireland in 1719, for America in 1766. The
great difference lay in the Legislature, and was the result of different
degrees of remoteness from the seat of power. America was profoundly
democratic from the beginning, outpacing the Mother Country by fully two
centuries. There was no aristocracy, and in most Colonies little
distinction between upper and middle classes. The popular Assemblies,
elected on the broadest possible franchise, were truly representative.
Some of the Legislative Councils, or Upper Chambers, were elective also.
Most of them, although nominated, and therefore inclined to be hostile
to the popular body, were nevertheless of identical social composition;
so that there was often an official, but never a caste, ascendancy. From
very early times there was occasional friction between the Home
Government, represented by the Governors, and the colonial democracies,
over such matters as taxation, official salaries, quartering of troops,
and navigation laws. Writs of _quo warranto_ were issued against
Connecticut, Carolina, New York, and Maryland, in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, and the Charter of Massachusetts, after long
wrangles with the Crown, was forfeited in 1684, and not restored until
1692, after a period of despotic government under Sir Edmund Andros. But
for a century or more the system worked well enough upon the whole.
Under the powerful lever of the representative Assembly, neutralized by
the ever-present need for military protection from the Mother Country,
and with the wholesome check to undue coercion set by the broad
Atlantic, civic freedom grew and flourished to a degree unknown in any
other part of the civilized world.

In Ireland civic freedom was unknown. There was no popular Assembly. A
wealthy aristocracy of English extraction and of Anglican faith, partly
resident, partly absentee, and wholly subservient to the English
Government, constituted the Upper House of that strange institution
known as Parliament, and to a great extent nominated and controlled the
Lower House through means frankly corrupt. Representation was almost
nominal; close pocket-boroughs predominated, and seats were bought and
sold in the open market. In the year 1790 more than a third of the
Members of the House of Commons were placemen, 216 Members out of 300
were elected by boroughs and manors, and, of these, 176 were elected by
individual patrons. Fifty-three of these patrons, nominating 123
Members, sat as Peers in the Upper House. Cash, places, and peerages,
were the usual considerations paid for maintaining a Government
majority. The Catholics, from three-quarters to five-sixths of the
population, had neither votes nor members; the Dissenters scarcely any
members and an almost powerless vote. The Irish Legislature, by an Act
as old as 1495, the famous Poynings' Law, could neither initiate nor
pass a measure without the consent of the English Privy Council, and the
Declaratory Act of 1719 confirmed the power of making English Acts
applicable to Ireland. Government in England itself was, no doubt,
unrepresentative and corrupt at that period, and the people paid the
penalty in full; but it was a national government, under the aegis of
the national faith, and resting, however remotely, on the ultimate
sanction of the people, just as American opinion, more democratically
ascertained, continued to control the major part of American affairs. In
Ireland the Government was systematically anti-Irish. There was no
career for Irishmen in Ireland. Both Catholics and Dissenters were
excluded from all civil and military offices; the highest posts were
generally given to Englishmen born and bred, and the country,
Episcopalian only to a fractional extent, was ruled by a narrow
Episcopalian oligarchy of wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered
Irish freedom for the place and power of their own families and
dependents. The conditions of this sordid exchange were the ground of
the first important Anglo-Irish political struggle in the eighteenth
century, when the English Viceroy, Townshend, succeeded in 1770-71, at
the cost of half a million, in transferring the bribing power, and
therefore the controlling power, from the "Undertakers," as they were
known, direct to the Crown.

There seems to have been no continuous English policy beyond that of
making Ireland completely subservient to English interests and purposes,
and often to purposes of the most humiliating and degrading kind. The
Irish Pension List has earned immortal infamy. Jobs too scandalous to
pass muster in England were systematically foisted upon the Irish
establishment. Royal mistresses, a host of needy Germans, a Danish Queen
banished for adultery, lived in England or abroad upon incomes drawn
from the impoverished Irish Exchequer. Nor was it only a question of
pensions. Quantities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given
to Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland. In short, the
English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spain's policy towards her
South American Colonies, minus the grosser forms of physical cruelty and
oppression. Yet Ireland, like the American Colonies until the verge of
the revolutionary struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in
peace and war. The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken,
inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, does not,
from the human standpoint, appear worthy of admiration, but it was a
fact. The few Catholic noblemen outdid the Protestants in expressions of
devotion; the Whiteboy risings were as little disloyal as religious. Not
a hand stirred for James or his heirs when Jacobite plots and risings
were causing grave public danger in England and Scotland. Catholic Lord
Trimleston offered exclusively Catholic regiments with Catholic officers
to George III. for foreign service in 1762, though they were vetoed by
what his Viceroy Halifax called the "ill-bred bigotry" of the Irish
Parliament. Nor was it till thirty years after that date that Protestant
discontent, under intolerable provocation, assumed an anti-dynastic and
Republican form. To compare the Imperial spirit displayed by America and
Ireland in their views and action is difficult, partly because the
various American Colonies differed widely, partly because there existed
in Ireland no organ of government which could express popular feeling.
Neither country, of course, paid any cash contribution to Imperial
expenses, though both could fairly claim that the English monopoly of
trade imposed an indirect tribute of indefinite size, while Ireland, in
pensions, rents to absentees, and sinecure appointments, was drained of
many millions more. American patronage was an element of substantial
value to England, but it was not on the Irish scale. America on the
whole, perhaps, showed less patriotic feeling than Ireland. With full
allowance for the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by the
British regulars to the American volunteers in their co-operation in the
French wars, it can scarcely be denied that the colonists, together with
much heroism and public spirit, showed occasional slackness and
parsimony in resisting the penetration of a foreign Power which
threatened to hem in their settlements from the St. Lawrence to the
mouth of the Mississippi. Ireland during the Seven Years' War, and until
the Peace of Paris in 1763, maintained a war establishment of 24,000