troops. She maintained a peace establishment of 12,000 troops, and from
1767 onwards of 15,000 troops. There never seems to have been a whisper
of protest from the Catholic population against these measures, nor,
except in the matter of the American War, to which we shall come
presently, from the Protestants. It may be added that, after 1767,
Catholics in considerable numbers were surreptitiously enlisted in the
ranks, in spite of the Penal Code, and from then until the present day
have fought for the Flag as staunchly as any other class of the King's
subjects.

It never occurred to responsible English statesmen that here was ground,
firm as a rock in America, and firm enough in Ireland, on which, if only
they obeyed the instincts and maxims upon which England herself had
risen to greatness, they might build a mighty and durable Imperial
structure. That loyalty, to be genuine and lasting, must spring from
liberty was a truth they did not appreciate, and to this truth,
strangely enough, in spite of the lessons of nearly a century and a
half, a numerous school of English statesmen is still blind. It was no
doubt a fatality that the smouldering discontent both of America and
Ireland burst into flame in the reign of a monarch who endeavoured, even
within the limits of Britain, to regain the arbitrary power which had
cost their throne to the Stuarts; it was an additional fatality that the
standard of public morals among the class through which he ruled during
the period of crisis had fallen to lower depths than ever before or
since. Even incorruptible men were either weak and selfish or subject to
some cardinal defect of temper or intellect which, at times of crisis,
neutralized their genius. Chatham and Burke were the noblest figures of
the time, yet Chatham, in his highest mood a nobler and truer champion
of American liberty than Burke, was Minister--nominally, at any
rate--when the Revenue Duties imposed upon the American Colonies in 1867
destroyed in a moment the reconciliation brought about by the repeal of
the Stamp Act. Burke was surely false to his political philosophy in
founding his American argument on expedience rather than on principle.
Chatham was a thorough democrat, trusting the people, poor or rich, rude
or cultured, common or noble, American or British. Burke, at a time when
the reflection of the genuine opinion of the nation in a pure and free
Parliament might have saved us, as his splendid orations could not save
us, from a disastrous war, scouted Parliamentary reform, and took his
unconscious share in playing the game of the most narrow coercionist
Tories like Charles Townshend and George III.

Of the interminable chain of fatalities which sicken the mind in
following every phase of Ireland's history, Burke's rigid temperamental
conservatism always seems to me the most fatal and the most melancholy.
It is not that he, the greatest intellect Ireland has ever produced,
made his career in England. By the time one reaches the period in which
he lived one gets used to the expatriation of Irish brains and vigour,
not only to England and America, but to Spain, France, Russia, and
Germany. It is that his intellect was so constituted as in the long run
to be useless, and on some occasions absolutely harmful, to Ireland,
sincerely as he loved her, and often as he supported measures for her
temporary benefit, and rejoiced in their temporary success. An incident
occurred in 1773 which tested his worth to Ireland, and incidentally
threw into strong light English views of Ireland and America at the
period immediately preceding the revolutionary epoch. The Irish
Government, not with any high social aim, but in desperation at the
growing Treasury deficit, proposed a tax upon the rents of absentee
landlords, and the fate of the measure, like all Irish measures, had to
be decided in the first instance in England. North's Tory Ministry
actually consented to it. Chatham, far from the active world, and too
broken in health to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea
for it; but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy absentee
proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remonstrance which carried
the day against it, and the author of this remonstrance, of all men in
the world, was the Irishman Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land
himself, devoted all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and
variety of his reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with
the garb of an enlightened patriotism.

He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only superficially right
about America. In the terms of this celebrated remonstrance, as
illuminated by his own private correspondence, his consistency is
revealed. By the very nature of things, he maintained, the central
Parliament of a great heterogeneous Empire must exercise a supreme
superintending power and regulate the polity and economy of the several
parts as they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would
have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the ground of
expediency alone, he would certainly have applied to America. The
proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and surely logic was never
distorted to stranger ends. The "ordinary residence" of the threatened
Irish landowners was in England, "to which country they were attached,
not only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of
indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not constitute in
themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish Government. They were
to be "fined" for living in England, as though that fine were not the
most just and politic which could be conceived, if it went even an inch
towards establishing the principle that Ireland's affairs were the
business of responsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further
principle, enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years
later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noblemen shared
in founding, that "property has its duties as well as its rights."
Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon irony, the tax would lead
directly to the "separation" of the two Kingdoms both in interest and
affection. The Colonies would follow the Irish example, and thus a
principle of disunion and separation would pervade the whole Empire; the
bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it
together would everywhere be loosened, and a narrow, insulated, local
feeling and policy would be proportionately increased.[12] Such was
Burke's Imperialism, as evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the
root of a frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But
the idea expressed by Burke--the spirit of his whole argument--went far
beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as
happened in one instance, by a Colony. It was the superbly grandiose
expression, and all the more insidiously seductive in that it was so
grandiose, of a principle which all thinking men now know, or ought to
know, is the negation of Empire, which lost us America, which came
within an ace of losing us Canada, which might well have lost us South
Africa, and which has in very fact lost us, though not yet irrevocably,
the "affection," to use Burke's word, of Ireland. We may call local
patriotism "narrow and insulated," if we please, but we recognize now,
in every case save that of Ireland, that it is the only foundation for,
and the only stimulant to, Imperial patriotism.

Chatham, an Englishman of the English, was nevertheless a better
Irishman than Burke, and therefore a better Imperialist. "The tax," he
wrote, "was founded on strong Irish policy. England, it is evident,
profits by draining Ireland of the vast incomes spent here from that
country. But I could not, as a Peer of England, advise the King, on
principles of indirect, accidental English policy, to reject a tax on
absentees sent over here as the genuine desire of the Commons of Ireland
acting in their proper and peculiar sphere, and exercising their
inherent exclusive right by raising supplies in the manner they judge
best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland
as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to
America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in
his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish
House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy,
though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so
distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial
independence remained unassailable, and eventually the Irish Parliament
itself summoned up the courage to adopt and act upon it.

It may seem almost impossible that in a body so corrupt and exclusive a
national sentiment should have arisen. But every elective assembly,
however badly constituted, contains the seeds of its own regeneration,
and, under even moderately favourable circumstances, moves irresistibly
towards freedom. The pity was that circumstances, save for one brief and
invigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ireland. The
task was enormous, demanding infinitely more self-sacrifice than even
the ablest and most prescient of her Parliamentarians realized. Until it
was too late, in fact, they never awoke to the true nature of the task,
dazzled by illusory victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish
Parliament was, they sought, strengthened by popular influences, to make
it the instrument for freeing Ireland from a paralyzing servitude; and
up to a point they succeeded, but they did not see that the only
security for real and permanent success was to reform the Parliament
itself. There the inveterate spirit of creed and class ascendancy,
resting in the last resort on English military power, survived long
enough to nullify their efforts.

The American Revolution and the Irish revolutionary renaissance--the one
achieved by a long and bitter war, the other without
bloodshed--originated and culminated together, were derived from the
same sources, and ran their course in close connection. In Ireland the
movement was exclusively Protestant, in America unsectarian; but in both
cases finance was the lever of emancipation. America, resenting the
commercial restrictions imposed by the Mother Country, but not, until
passion had obscured all landmarks, contesting their abstract justice,
and suffering no great material harm from their incidence, fought for
the principle of self-taxation--a principle which did, of course,
logically include, as the Americans instinctively felt, that of
commercial freedom. Ireland, harassed by commercial restrictions far
more onerous, naturally regarded their abolition as vital, and the
control of internal taxation as subsidiary. Apart from concrete
grievances, both countries had to fear an unlimited extension of British
claims founded on the all-embracing Declaratory Acts of 1719 and 1766.

Unfortunately for herself, Ireland for seventy years or more had been
steadily supplying America with the human elements of resistance in
their most energetic and independent form, and robbing herself
proportionately Approximately, how many Protestants belonging mainly to
Ulster, whether through eviction from the land, industrial unemployment,
or disgust at social and political ostracism, left Ireland for America
in the course of the eighteenth century, it is impossible to say; but
the number, both relatively to population and relatively to the total
emigration, Catholic and Protestant, to all parts of the world, was
undoubtedly very large. Mr. Egerton, in his "Origin and Growth of the
English Colonies," reckons that in 1775 a sixth part of the thirteen
insurrectionary Colonies was composed of Scots-Irish exiles from Ulster,
and that half the Protestant population of that Province emigrated to
those Colonies between 1730 and 1770. As the crisis approached,
emigration became an exodus. Thirty thousand of the farming class are
said to have been driven west by the wholesale evictions of the early
seventies, and ten thousand weavers followed them during the disastrous
depression in the linen trade caused by interruption of commerce with
America. The majority went to the northern Colonies, especially
Pennsylvania, took from the first a vehement stand against the Royal
claims, and supplied some of Washington's best soldiers. A minority went
to the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, and were little
heard of until as late in the war as 1780, when Tarleton began his
anti-guerilla campaign in the South. Then they woke up, and became, like
their compatriots of the North, formidable and implacable foes.

Ireland and America, therefore, embarked on their struggle with the
English Parliament in close sympathy. The treatise of Molyneux on Irish
liberty was read with wide approval in America. Franklin visited and
encouraged the Irish patriots, and the Americans in 1775 issued a
special address to them, asserting an identity of interest. Chatham, on
the eve of war, dwelt strongly in the House of Lords upon the same
identity of interest, and in doing so expressly coupled together Irish
Catholics and Protestants.

Although united by interest and sentiment, Ireland and America entered
on the struggle under widely varying conditions. The American Colonies
were thirteen separate units, with only a rude organization for common
action, and in each of these units there existed a cleavage of opinion,
based neither on class nor creed, between rebels and loyalists. In spite
of this weakness, the revolt was thoroughly national in the sense that
it was organized and maintained through the State Assemblies, resting on
a broad popular franchise. In Ireland, unbought and unofficial opinion
was united against England. On the other hand, there was no national
Legislature; only an enslaved and unrepresentative Legislature, tempered
by a band of exceptionally brilliant and upright men, and continually
thrust forward in spite of itself into bold and independent action by
unconstitutional pressure from the unrepresented elements outside.
Success so won, as we shall see, was delusive.

We may note two important additional circumstances: first, the dense
mist of ignorance in which, and largely in consequence of which, England
began her quarrel both with America and Ireland. The average Englishman
was probably even more ignorant of Ireland, which was sixty miles away,
than of America, which was three thousand miles away. I am not at all
sure that that fact is not true still. At any rate, it was true then.
Yet knowledge of Ireland was more necessary, because her condition was
bad in ways unknown in America. In all the essentials of material
well-being, America was supremely fortunate, while Ireland was in the
depths of misery. It is not that this misery went undescribed or
unlamented, or that it was not realized by a small number of Englishmen.
Some of the most famous writings of the time, from the mordant satire of
Swift to the learned and elaborate diagnosis of Arthur Young, laid bare
the hideous ravages wrought by misrule in Ireland; but they had little
or no effect upon English statesmen, and were unread by the only classes
from which, if they had had knowledge, proper practical sympathy might
have come. Until Townshend's Viceroyalty (1767-1772) most of the Irish
Viceroys were absentees for the greater part of their term of office,
leaving the conduct of Irish affairs to English Bishops and Judges, the
wisest and most humane of whom could make little or no impression on
English official indifference. American Governors were at any rate
resident, or mainly resident, and a few were good and popular
administrators, though the information which most of them supplied to
the Home Government showed a blindness to what was going on under their
very eyes which would be incomprehensible if we did not know by
experience that it is the invariable result of irresponsible rule over
white men, whether at home or abroad. If, without the presence of race
distinctions, it needed Parliamentary reform in England itself to force
the ruling class to study with real sympathy the needs, character, and
desires of their own people, naturally the same ruling class, sending
out its own members or dependents to America, obtained the most
grotesquely distorted notions of what Americans were and what they
wanted or resented. "Their office," wrote Franklin of the Governors,[13]
"makes them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being
conscious that they are hated, they become malicious. Their malice urges
them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to
Administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to
encourage the use of severity) as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly.
Government believes all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance
its officers," etc. The same spirit pervades the official correspondence
of even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and
ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were at all
times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension which needed only
skilful fomentation by her English rulers to ruin all hopes of
reconciliation and unity. That phase was to come after the first Irish
victories. For the present the system--for it can scarcely be called a
policy--was to irritate all Irishmen and all Americans alike,
irrespective of creed, class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each
side of the Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people.

The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. Holland in his
"Imperium et Libertas," is the confusion of political ideas in regard to
the status of white dependencies--a confusion greatly augmented by
loose and misleading analogies with India and the tropical Colonies.
Even a genius like Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled.
Chatham came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak
of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw him back
on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong. It was not fully
understood that there must be a radical difference between the
government of places settled and populated by white colonists and of
places merely exploited by white traders. All the prerogatives of the
Crown and Parliament were theoretically valid over both classes of
dependency, and to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to
be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy. Honest and fair-minded
politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local freedom with
Imperial unity. We have the key now, though we have made no use of it in
Ireland; but most of our forefathers not only had no glimmering of the
truth when the fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war
itself, and remained unenlightened for sixty years more. If the
renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the
negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite certain
that friction would have subsequently arisen on other points. The idea
of what we now know as "responsible government" was unknown. Short of
coercive war, there seemed to be only two altogether logical
alternatives--complete separation and legislative Union. America
obtained the one, Ireland was eventually to undergo the other; but it is
interesting to remember that suggestions, rejected by Franklin as
useless, were made for the representation of the American Colonies in
the English Parliament, just as suggestions for a legislative Union
between Ireland and England appeared intermittently all through the
eighteenth century, long before such a Union was a question of practical
politics.

I need only briefly summarize the incidents which ended in the year 1782
with the final loss of the American Colonies, and the simultaneous
achievement by Ireland of an apparent legislative independence. To take
America first, the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, and, thanks to the
tumult it created, repealed by the Whigs in 1766, though the Declaratory
Act which accompanied the repeal neutralized its good results. The new
Revenue Duties on glass, paper, painters' colours, and tea were imposed
in 1767, reviving the old irritation, and all but that on tea were
removed, after a period of growing friction, in 1770. Another
comparative lull was succeeded by fresh disorder when in 1773 the East
India Company was permitted to send tea direct to America, and Boston
celebrated its historic "tea-party." The coercion of Massachusetts
followed, with Gage as despotic Military Governor, and, as a result, all
the Colonies were galvanized into unity. In September, 1774, the
Continental Congress met, framed a Declaration of Rights, and obtained a
general agreement to cease from all commerce with Britain until
grievances were redressed. Fresh coercion having been applied, war broke
out in 1775. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776,
by John Hancock, President of Congress and the descendant of an Ulster
exile, and was first read aloud in Philadelphia by Captain John Nixon,
the son of an evicted Wexford farmer. Another Irishman, General
Montgomery, led the invasion of Canada.[14] The war, with manifold
vicissitudes, dragged on for eight years; but the surrender of
Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, virtually ended the physical
struggle, while the resolution of the House of Commons on February 27,
1782, against the further prosecution of hostilities, ended the contest
of principle.

The turning-point had been the intervention of the French in 1778, and
the same event was to turn the scale in Ireland. There, for many years
past, the public finances had been sinking into a more and more
scandalous condition. Taxation was by no means heavy, but pensions and
sinecures multiplied, and the debt swelled. Inevitably there grew up
within Parliament a small independent opposition which would not be
bribed into conniving at the ruin of Ireland, while even bought placemen
were stung into throwing their votes into the Irish rather than the
English scale. Frequent efforts were made to use the insufficiency of
the hereditary revenue as a lever for gaining control of finance and for
obtaining domestic reform. An Octennial Act, passed in 1768, went a
little way towards transforming Parliament from a permanent privileged
Committee, under the control of the Executive, into the semblance at
least of a free Assembly, and the first dissolution under this Act, in
1776, produced the famous Parliament which, though elected on the same
narrow and corrupt basis as before, in the space of six years first
admitted the principle of toleration for all creeds, and wrested from
English hands commercial and legislative autonomy. It came too late to
avert--if, indeed, it could ever have averted--the implication of
Ireland in the American War, its predecessor of 1775 having, in defiance
of Irish opinion, subscribed an Address to the Crown, expressing
"abhorrence" of the American revolt and "inviolable attachment to the
just rights" of the King's Government, and having obediently voted four
thousand Irish troops for the war.

Nor, for all the impassioned eloquence of Grattan and Hussey Burgh, did
the real driving-power of the new Parliament come from within its own
ranks, but from the unrepresented multitude outside. A clause removing
the test from Dissenters was struck out of the Catholic Relief Act of
1778, mainly owing to dictation from England, but partly from resentment
against Presbyterian sympathy with the American cause. It was only in
1780, when the Presbyterians were enrolled in that formidable
revolutionary organization known as the Volunteers, that a test which
had excluded them from all share in the government of their adopted
country for seventy-four years was repealed. As for the Catholics, the
small measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition
anywhere. Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against worship
and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and the sheer
impossibility of enforcement. The religion, naturally, had thriven under
persecution, so that in spite of the Code's manifold temptations to
recant, only four thousand converts had been registered in the last
fifty years. The laws designed to safeguard the wholesale confiscations
of the previous century had long ago achieved their purpose, and men
were beginning to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the
great mass of the people poor and ignorant. The real spirit of
toleration shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of which
enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, was small
enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics for generations
past, the absence of all tendency in them towards counter-persecution,
or even towards intolerance of Protestantism in any of its forms,
Quaker, Huguenot, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of
their own overwhelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the
tithes. Politically they were a source of great strength to the
Government. When the Presbyterians condemned the American War, the
Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in favour of it as warmly
as the tame majority in Parliament.

Conservatives by religion, their devotion to authority annulled all
instincts of revenge for the hideous wrongs of the past. The Government,
now on the verge of a war with the two great Catholic Powers of Europe,
began to realize this, and to feel the wisdom of some degree of
conciliation. After all, only four years before they had not merely
tolerated, but established, the Catholic Church in the conquered
province of Quebec, with the result that the French Canadians remained
loyal during the American War. But neither the Government nor the finest
independent men in Parliament--not even Grattan--entertained the
remotest idea of admitting Irish Catholics to any really effective share
in the Government which their loyalty made stable. That noble but
hopeless conception originated later, as the dynamic impulse for
commercial freedom and legislative independence was originating now,
outside the walls of Parliament.

The rupture with France in 1778 denuded Ireland of troops, and called
into being the Protestant Volunteers; a disciplined, armed body, headed
by leaders as weighty and respectable as Lord Charlemont. This body,
formed originally for home defence, by a natural and legitimate
transition assumed a political aspect, and demanded from a dismayed and
terrorized Government commercial freedom for Ireland. For once in her
life Ireland was too strong to be coerced. Punishment like that applied
to Massachusetts was physically impossible. The bitter protests of
English merchants passed unheeded, and the fiscal claims of the
Volunteers, with their cannon labelled "Free Trade or this," were
granted in full early in 1780. The moral was to persist. From 40,000 the
numbers of the Volunteers rose in the two succeeding years to 80,000,
and they stood firm for further concessions. The national movement grew
like a river in spate; it swept forward the lethargic Catholics and
engulfed Parliament. In a tempest of enthusiasm Grattan's Declaration of
Independence was carried unanimously in the Irish House of Commons on
April 16, 1782, and a month later received legal confirmation in England
at the hands of the same Whig Government and Parliament which broke off
hostilities with America, and in the same session.

America took her own road and worked out her own magnificent destiny.
Most of us now honour Washington and the citizen troops he led. We say
they fought, as Hampden and their English forefathers fought, for a
sublime ideal, freedom, and that they were chips of the old block. But
let not distance delude us into supposing that they were without the
full measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer
considerable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of smothered
revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven years of open war
which preceded their victory. Washington's genius carried them safely
through the ordeal of the war, and the still more exacting ordeal of
political reconstruction after the war, but it is well known how nearly
he and his staunchest supporters failed. The Revolution, like all
revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human
nature. Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for
law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establishment
of good laws. As I have already indicated, the dislike and the
systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period
when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably
sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension. However true that
may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more
heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any
other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar
conditions. Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always
seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake
cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of
character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case
against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has,
at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa,
and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their
faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material
for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the
revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public
spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking,
vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify,
and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for
self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition
in the case of Ireland. Mr. J.W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining
historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it
can be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts--men of his
own national stock--as the pestilent offspring of an "irreconcilable
faction," which had originally left England deeply imbued with the
doctrines of Republicanism. Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge
retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of
meanness and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and
refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too
contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the
maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is always the "mob," the
"ruffians," the "rabble," of Boston who carry out the reprisals against
the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth
century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of
unscrupulous "agitators." It has been, and remains, an obsession with
the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered
community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want
liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an
artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots--a view
which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American
and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and
tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the
argument for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for
liberty; and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of
self-contradiction and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible
account of a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was
"factitious," initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and
sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he contends,
was "the work of a small but energetic and well-organized minority
towards which the mass of the people, when not directly hostile, was
mainly indifferent." Happily, Mr. Fortescue's candour as an historian of
facts gives us the clue to this strange tangle. We find no evidence that
the sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, and
whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with ease in
co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in fact, a majority,
nor that they were either better or worse men, or more or less ardent
patriots, than the mutinous minority, or the British regular soldiers
themselves. Their loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is
sometimes interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious;
they are given to desertion, like Washington's troops, like Lee's and
Grant's troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops and like all
Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine war with the duty of
keeping their homes and business afloat. We find, too, that a
counter-current of desertion flows from the British, and still more from
the German, regulars, also a natural enough phenomenon in what was
virtually a civil war for liberty; so that "General Greene was often
heard to say that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with
British soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of
America." And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case,
exultingly quotes against the Americans "the cynical Benedict Arnold,
who knew his countrymen," and who said: "Money will go farther than arms
in America." Yet Arnold, whose opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue
accepts as correct and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter,
but a perjured military traitor of the most despicable kind. We may
conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole Revolution,
that Washington not only knew his countrymen, who were Mr. Fortescue's
countrymen, better than Arnold, but was a better representative of their
dominant characteristics.[15]

Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, and we
know the source of that prepossession, a passionate love of the British
Army, which does him great honour, while it distorts his political
vision. I should not refer at such length to his view of the American
War were it not that, whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for
discussion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predominant
philosophy. Historical sense seems to vanish, and the same savage racial
bias supervenes, whether the unruly people concerned are absolutely
consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a
general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce
under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under
coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the
dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the
leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist
minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want
what by all the constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and
the correspondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a
conviction solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while
making that very violence an argument for the depravity of those who use
it, and a pretext for denying them self-government.

All this is terribly true in the case of Ireland, and when I next revert
to the American continent, the reader will observe that the same ideas
were entertained towards Canada, the only white Colony left to the
British Empire after the loss of the thirteen States.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable. Nearly all
historians have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees; but
Mr. S.B. Weeks, a Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that
this was not the case ("Religious Development in the Province of North
Carolina," Baltimore, 1892). The Charter contained a clause for liberty
of conscience on the instructive ground that, "by reason of the remote
distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and
conformity established in this realm."

[9] "Church and State in Maryland," George Petrie. Lord Baltimore, the
Catholic founder and Proprietary, enforced complete tolerance from the
first (1634), and secured the passage of an Act in 1649 giving legal
force to the policy, with heavy penalties against interference with any
sect. In 1654 Puritans gained control of the Assembly, and passed an Act
against Popery. A counter-revolution repealed this Act, but finally in
1689 the Church of England was established by law.

[10] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. i., pp.
408-410.

[11] Until 1692 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, elected
their own Governors. Massachusetts continued to have Colonial Governors,
and sometimes New Jersey and New Hampshire. Proprietary Governments were
gradually abolished and converted into "Royal" Governments like the
rest. At the period of the Declaration of Independence two only were
left--Pennsylvania and Maryland (see "Origin and Growth of the English
Colonies," H.E. Egerton).

[12] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. ii.,
pp. 124-126.

[13] Trevelyan, "The American Revolution," vol. i., p. 16.

[14] See "The Irish Race in America," by Captain Ed. O'Meagher Condore.

[15] "History of the British Army," vol. iii.




CHAPTER III

GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT


We left Ireland in 1782 apparently in possession of a triumph as great
as that of America, though won without bloodshed and without the least
tincture of sedition; for the Volunteers of 1782 were as loyal to the
Crown as the most ardent American royalists. In the light of political
ideas developed at a much later period, we know that the American
Colonies might have remained within the Empire, even if their utmost
claims had been granted. Had the idea of responsible government been
understood, it would have been realized that their exclusive control of
taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with Imperial Union, but
essential to it. Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true
solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they
had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of
ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and
England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like
Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister nations, with the old
irritating servitude swept away, and the bonds of natural affection and
natural interest substituted. That the close proximity of the two
nations, however marked the contrast between their natural
characteristics, made these bonds far more necessary and valuable than
in the case of America, stood to reason, and, again, the fact was
recognized in Anglo-Irish relations. America had fought rather than
submit to a forced contribution to Imperial funds. Nobody in Ireland, in
or out of Parliament, had ever objected in principle to an indirect
voluntary contribution in troops, and now that the American War was
ended, non-Parliamentary objections to one particular application of the
principle had no further substance. Nor, as was shortly to be shown in
the reception given in Ireland to Pitt's abortive Commercial
Propositions of 1785, was there any objection to a direct contribution
in money on a fixed annual scale in return for a mutual free trade.[16]
The sun had surely risen over a free yet loyal Ireland.

Never was there a more complete delusion. It would have been far better
for Ireland if she had never had a Parliament at all, but had had to
seek her own salvation in the healthy rough-and-tumble of domestic
revolution. The mere name of "Parliament" seems perpetually to have
hypnotized even its best members, and the illusion was at its highest
now. Nothing essential had been changed. Commercial freedom was the most
real gain, because it involved the definite repeal of certain trade-laws
and the permission to Ireland to make what she liked and send it where
she liked; but it was a small gain without some means of finding out
what Ireland really liked, and translating that will, without external
pressure, into law. The Parliament was neither an organ of public
opinion nor a free agent. It was even more corrupt and less
representative than before. It was as completely under the control of
the English Government as before. The modern conception of a Colonial
Ministry serving under a constitutional Governor selected by the Crown,
but acting with the advice of his Ministry, was unknown. The English
Government, through its Lord-Lieutenant, still appointed English
Ministers in Ireland, and in the hands of these Ministers lay not only
that large portion of the national income known as the hereditary
revenue, but the whole machinery of patronage and corruption. Even the
legislative independence was unreal; for majorities still had to be
bought, Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is,
English ministerial assent; so that powerful English pressure could be,
and was, brought to bear upon their policy and construction. And the
worst of it was that English pressure here and elsewhere meant then what
it meant in the next century, and what it too often means now, English
party pressure exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve
sectional English ends. In short, Ireland, so far from being a nation,
was still virtually a Colony, subjected to the worst conceivable form of
colonial Government, groaning under economic evils unknown in the least
fortunate of the Colonies, and without the numerous mitigating
circumstances and the hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the
seat of Empire. On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all,
nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages were about to
culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, complicated immensely
the problem of regeneration in Ireland.

What was the remedy? Parliamentary reform. The Volunteers saw this
instantly. Parliament itself scouted the idea of reform, because it
threatened the Protestant ascendancy. Any weakening of the Protestant
ascendancy was unthinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in
1778 had coined the grandiose phrase that "the Irish Protestant could
never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave," and
who afterwards explained what he meant by saying that the liberty of the
Catholic was to be only such as was "entirely consistent with the
Protestant ascendancy," and that "the Protestant interest was his first
object." Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland
was fundamental. What was its corollary? Dependence on England.
Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, or, as in Ireland, on
both, cannot last in any white community without external support, and
the external support for ascendancy in Ireland was English force without
and English bribes within. There was the chain of causation, the vicious
circle rather; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought he
had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences which were
throttling her. He could not see that the more he wrestled for the
independence of a sham Parliament, while resisting its transformation
into a real Parliament, the more he strengthened those influences,
because he inevitably widened the gulf between Parliament and the Irish
people. The glamour his brilliant gifts had thrown over the Irish
Parliament only served to divert his own mind and the minds of other
talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ireland. Time
and talent were wasted from the first over points of pride, trivialities
which seemed portentous to over-sensitive minds; metaphysical puzzles as
to the exact nature of the relations now existing between Ireland and
England; whether the repeal of the Poynings' Act and the Declaratory Act
were sufficient guarantees of freedom; whether Ireland herself should
nominate a Regent or accept the nomination from England. Meanwhile, the
sands were running out, and Ireland was a slave to a minute but powerful
minority of her sons and, only through them, to England.

Yet the heart of Ireland was sound. All the materials for regeneration
were there. The Catholics, whom by an old inherited instinct Grattan
professed to dread, were the most Conservative part of the population,
so Conservative as to be unaware of the source of their miseries,
without the smallest leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a
notion of sedition or rebellion. Paradox as it seems, if they leaned in
any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted authority
of the day, the Irish Parliament. But the truth is that they were
without political consciousness, behind the times, unappreciative of the
new forces operating round them. In sore need of courageous and
enlightened guidance from men of their own faith, they were almost
leaderless. The leeway to be made up after the destructive action of the
penal laws was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or
will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the further
relaxation of those laws, to the education of their backward
co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty. For relief they
instinctively looked towards the only legal source of relief, though the
source of secular oppression, Parliament. But this was habit. The
Catholics at this time were like clay in the hands of the potter, open
to any curative and ennobling impulse. That impulse came, as was right
and natural, from the Protestant side. The only healthy political
organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North,
with their headquarters at Belfast. They represented all that was best
in the Protestant population. They had won the practical victory, such
as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular
victory. They grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten,
and that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering some 80,000
or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had
no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament. Parliament at once
stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the "Pretorian
bands." "And now," said Grattan in his magnificent way, "having given a
Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the
people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majestically a
great work."

But the work was not begun. Parliament was the enemy of the people, and
the Volunteers knew it. Now, what was the "people" in the minds of the
Volunteers? Undoubtedly they did not, after a century of racial
ascendancy, perform the miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the
principle of absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and
Protestant alike. Such mental revulsions rarely occur among men, and
when they do occur are apt to produce reactionary cataclysms. But they
did from the first give a real meaning to Grattan's vague rhetoric about
Catholic slaves; from the first they made overtures towards the
Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic franchise as a part
of their scheme of reform ten years before that enfranchisement, without
Parliamentary reform and therefore valueless, became a practical issue.
For the present these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand
of the Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin in
November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction of Parliament
on a democratic Protestant basis. The Catholic franchise had been
strongly supported, but by the influence of Charlemont and Flood
rejected. It is, of course, easy to maintain in theory that a democratic
Protestant ascendancy so designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom
as an aristocratic and corrupt ascendancy; but nobody with faith in
human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm that the
process of reform would have ended with the enactment of the Volunteer
Bill. No present-day Protestant Ulsterman should entertain such a
dishonouring doubt. Mercifully, men are so made that, if left to
themselves, they go forward, not backward. A pure Assembly, formed on
the Volunteer plan, stimulated by the enlightened conscience which such
an Assembly invariably develops, by the discovery of the fundamental
identity of interests between the great bulk of Catholics and
Protestants, and by the manly instinct of self-preservation against
undue English encroachment, would have moved rapidly towards tolerance
and equality.

But the Assembly which might have saved Ireland never came into being.
The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands. The metamorphosis
they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant
political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with