Home Rule Part 9

It was a tremendous demand, but the British Government had no choice except to yield. Exhausted with the American struggle, the British Ministers could not face a second war. The demands of Ireland were granted, and thus in a moment Grattan's Parliament, in the full panoply of armed strength, sprang into existence.

Well might Grattan exclaim, at the opening of that Parliament, in words that still send a thrill through every true lover of freedom:--

"I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a Nation!

In that new character I now hail her! And, bowing to her august presence, I say, _Esto Perpetua_."[64]

FOOTNOTES:

[56] The first real representative English Parliament, of course, was summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1265. Grattan was accustomed to claim "seven centuries" as the lifetime of the Irish Const.i.tution; but in that, of course, he went back behind the days of a representative Parliament.

[57] Poynings' Law was pa.s.sed by the Irish Parliament, at Drogheda, in 1495, under the influence of Sir Edward Poynings, the Lord Deputy of Ireland to the Viceroy Prince Henry, afterwards King Henry VIII. The essential provision of Poynings' Law was that it secured all initiative in legislation to the English Privy Council, leaving to Ireland nothing but the simple power of acceptance or rejection. Ireland was thus left only a veto, though a veto is often a considerable weapon.

[58] An Act in the reign of Mary forbade the Irish Parliament to alter or add to an Act of Parliament returned to her from England.

[59] 6 of George I. made the Irish Parliament subordinate and dependent.

[60] See Appendix B.

[61] Among the Viceroys converted of later years to Home Rule by experience of the present system of Irish Government may be named Lord Spencer, Lord Dudley, and probably the last Lord Carnarvon. The resignation of Mr. George Wyndham was due to the suspicion of his conversion.

[62] Quoted by Mr. Stephen Gwynn, M.P., in his brilliant book "The Case for Home Rule." (Maunsel & Co., Dublin.)

[63] See the essays on Flood and Grattan. (Longmans, 2 vols., 1903.)

[64] Grattan, 16th April, 1782.

HOME RULE IN HISTORY

GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT

"To destroy is easy: the edifices of the mind, like the fabrics of marble, require an age to build, but ask only minutes to precipitate: and as the fall of both is an effort of no time, so neither is it a business of any strength. A pick-axe and a common labourer will do the one--a little lawyer, a little pimp, a wicked Minister the other."

GRATTAN (1800.)

"Yet I do not give up my country. I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a glow of beauty--

'Thou art not conquered: Beauty's ensign yet Is crimson on thy lips and in thy cheeks, And Death's pale flag is not advanced there.'"

GRATTAN (In the final debate on the Act of Union, May 26th, 1800).

CHAPTER VIII.

HOME RULE IN HISTORY

Grattan's Parliament was the first Parliament with full legislative authority possessed by Ireland since the time of Henry VII. It existed for nearly twenty years, and in that brief time it did a great work for Ireland. If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough, in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament with his venomous hate, and finally compa.s.sed its doom--the famous Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:--

"=There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as Ireland.="[65]

But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by experience. One was that although the Irish Parliament obtained the right of legislation, the appointment of the Government and the Executive was still placed in the hands of the Irish Privy Council, and therefore of the British Central Government. That meant, in the end, that the British Government still possessed the leverage for recovering the powers of legislative initiative and legislative veto.

As far as Ireland possessed separate executive powers, she used them with loyalty and patriotism. Take, for instance, her finance. Ireland possessed, under the settlement, a separate Irish Exchequer, and the British Government could levy no war taxes in Ireland, except with the consent of the Irish Parliament. That gave to the Irish Parliament an immense power of checking and hampering England in her struggle against Napoleon. If we were to judge from some of the talk heard at the present moment, one would take for granted that Ireland must have refused all help to England in that struggle.

On the contrary, the Irish Parliament voted sums freely to Pitt for the wars against France. The Irish statesmen would have no dealings with the English Whigs in their pro-French policy. Like that other great Irishman, Edmund Burke, Grattan was opposed to the spirit of the French Revolution. In that great European crisis Ireland showed herself what she really is--a nation inclined in all essentials to conservative rather than revolutionary ideas.

"CATHOLIC EMANc.i.p.aTION"

But it was the existence of a separate external executive, gradually limiting the legislative powers of the Irish Parliament, that finally brought out the gravity of the other signal defect in the settlement of 1782. That defect was the failure to effect a complete settlement of the Catholic question. For the Irish Parliament, even after 1782, was still confined to Protestants. Could any reasonable man call that a final solution of the problem of government in a country where four-fifths of the people were Catholics? With a truer foresight than Grattan, Flood desired that the Volunteers should refuse to lay down their arms until the Catholic question had been settled. But Grattan, still filled with that spirit of generous trust which has been the undoing of so many n.o.ble Irishmen, refused to use the military power for any further exaction of terms. He disbanded the Volunteers.

Grattan trusted that once the Irish Parliament was endowed with full powers, the Catholic question would settle itself. He could rely with certainty on his own Protestant followers. He persuaded them to repeal the penal laws. He prevailed upon them to extend the franchise to the Catholic peasant. Both those great reforms were pa.s.sed through the Irish Parliament in the fulness of its strength and power, and the British Government were compelled to acquiesce. But there Grattan reached the limit of his authority. There was one more great step which had to be taken before the Catholic claims could be satisfied. It was necessary to concede the right to a Catholic, as to a Protestant, to sit in the Irish Parliament. When Grattan made that proposal, he found himself faced with new forces. The British Government and the Ascendancy Party in Ireland had already begun to regain their hold over the Irish Parliament. The forces of patronage and corruption were already at work.

If those had been the only powers Grattan might have defeated them.

Neither he nor his admirers were perhaps wholly aware of what we now know to be the centre of this resistance--the dogged, almost insane, obstinacy of George III. Pitt indeed had already lost his earlier reforming zeal. The shadow of the French struggle had already fallen across his path, and had already shaken his early faith in freedom and progress. But if Pitt had been left alone he might still have done justice. It was George III. that lost us the soul of Ireland, as he lost us both the body and soul of North America.

There were, indeed, moments in those difficult days when the British people seemed to realise dimly the wisdom of what Burke saw to be the wisest British fighting policy--the policy of rallying Catholic Ireland against revolutionary France. There was, for instance, the mission of Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795--a Whig mission extorted from Pitt against his will, due to a Parliamentary complication, and backed from London with but half-hearted support. That famous mission which sent through Ireland such a strange, sad thrill of hope, soon closed in mist and darkness. Lord Fitzwilliam went to Ireland, as many Englishmen have gone since, with the intention of doing justice. He was thwarted, like most others, by the resistance of the local Ascendancy Party, fighting doggedly for the remnants of its power. It was the place-holders of Ireland who, intriguing with the Ministry in London, led to the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.[66]

For that party was then playing the same part as it is attempting to play to-day. They were playing then, as ever since, on the nerves of Protestant England. They were conjuring up the dread of Catholic power, and the terror of Irish disloyalty. Unhappily, in the confusions of the moment--the confusions of the French wars--they succeeded. By compelling the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam they wrecked the hopes of the Grattan Parliament.

For after 1795 that Parliament was practically doomed, and events moved rapidly to their climax. Grattan, thwarted in his policy, and unwilling to be responsible for a body over which he had no control, withdrew into retirement. The Irish Catholics, feeling themselves again betrayed and deserted, relapsed all over Ireland into sullen indifference and detachment. The Protestant Parliament, deprived of their leader, swung more and more towards the Ascendancy Party. Even so, indeed, the virtue of self-government continued to work. No Parliament has left a better record of good local work for the prosperity of its country than Grattan's Parliament. From end to end of Ireland new industries had sprung up, and new life had been put into old industries. Ireland then was prosperous. Her exports had doubled. Her wealth was increasing. Her towns overflowed with life, and Dublin for the moment almost rivalled London in its brilliancy and its wit.[67]

THE GREAT REBELLION

This prosperity might have saved Grattan's Parliament but for a new movement which had crossed the two channels from France. It is doubtful whether the Catholics alone could have wrecked Grattan's Parliament. It was, curiously enough, the Irish Presbyterians of Ulster--our friends, the Orangemen--who sowed the seeds of revolt against the Protestant Parliament of 1782. It was they, in the combination known as the "United Irishmen," who started the movement that culminated in the Irish Rebellion in 1798. These Presbyterian Nonconformists had all been deeply affected by the doctrines of the French Revolution. They had for years past been agitating for a reform of the Irish Parliament on the lines subsequently adopted in 1831--chiefly by the abolition of the rotten boroughs. Grattan was with them, but again he was powerless. He was opposed, both in Dublin and in London, by the existing executives.

Those executives now rested their power almost entirely on the members returned by those very same rotten boroughs. For ever since 1782 bribery had been going on, and as early as 1790 England had been rapidly buying back the hold she had lost in 1782. These being her weapons, it was not likely that the Irish executive was going to yield to the claims of the Irish Presbyterians. The Government resisted, and the movement of the Irish Reformers became more and more formidable.

All these causes of unrest culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798--a horrible event, beginning with the lawlessness of the revolutionary Presbyterians in the north--lawlessness so feebly checked as to raise grave suspicions in regard to the att.i.tude of the Irish Government itself towards a possible revolution. But the outrages of the Orangemen on the Catholics in Ulster, and the Catholic feeling of desertion by the Government, soon produced a far more terrible outbreak in the south. That practically culminated in a religious war between Catholic and Protestant. From that moment the Rebellion was marked by atrocities on both sides almost as terrible as anything which occurred in the French Revolution. The Rebellion was extinguished in blood and fire.

The period of exhaustion and despair that followed in Ireland was seized upon by Castlereagh and Pitt for destroying the Irish Parliament. An immense machinery of bribery and corruption, a.s.sisted by pledges that were broken and prophecies that failed, all working under the double shadow of rebellion and war, drove the Irish Parliament to reluctant suicide, and pa.s.sed into law, both at Dublin and Westminster, the Union Act of 1800.

That great light of the Irish Parliament thus pa.s.sed suddenly into darkness. The Chamber which had resounded with the eloquence of Flood and Grattan pa.s.sed over to the money-changers, and ever since the clink of coin has taken the place of the silver voices of the Irish orators.[68]

AFTER THE UNION

The events of 1800 left Ireland, for the moment, prostrate under the heel of Great Britain. The last remnants of self-government disappeared with the absorption of the two exchequers in 1817. Although Ireland still retained a separate administration, that administration was not under the control of any self-governing authority. Out of the Dragon's teeth of the Union rose the sinister army of a new bureaucracy, recruited almost entirely by the enemies of Ireland, and for the most part even working with its guns trained against the hopes and aspirations of the Irish race.