The Framework of Home Rule

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.

CHAPTER II

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER III

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.

The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform Bill reached Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing the Volunteer dress. It was rejected on the first vote. No doubt the circumstances were humiliating, and if there had been any serious inclination in Parliament towards self-reform and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous monopoly, we should freely forgive rejection. But there was little or none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not in the dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that the Volunteers themselves were overawed by a strong body of British regular troops, mustered for the occasion under General Burgoyne. The vicious circle was complete. Forced to choose between reform and dependence on England, Parliament chose the latter. And only a year and a half before Grattan had dazzled his hears with the words: "Ireland is now a nation ... esto perpetua."

It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly. They were ahead of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the vital importance of a reformed Parliament. They were far ahead of England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious tolerance—witness the Gordon riots in London two years before. Their Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot Assembly. For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their irregular power. Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which, although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied mutatis mutandis from the American petitions prior to the war, and was to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history." Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."