From The Irish Review, May 1912.
The definition of the third Home Rule Bill as a Charter of Liberty is subject to the following corrections: The authority of the proposed Parliament does not extend to the armed man or to the tax-gatherer. It is checked by the tidal waters and bounded by the British Treasury. It cannot counter the settled purpose of the Cabinet in London. It may make laws, but it cannot command the power to enforce them. It may fill its purse, but it cannot have its purse in its keeping.
If this be Liberty, the lexicographers have deceived us. The Irish Times, Archbishop Crozier and Mr. Balfour write in defence of the Dictionary. They shoot scorn at the revised definition of the word whose fixed meaning has been written in the blood of the nations. And a nation which has sacrificed much to Liberty stands unmoved. The proceedings of the recent Synod of the Church of Ireland supply its reason. It read, that after the Primate had ridiculed in the name of Liberty the third Home Rule Bill, the Rev. Mr. Hannay asked was it well they should proclaim allegiance to bureaucratic Government directed by aliens, and the Synod hollo’d ‘Yes.’
The defects of the Home Rule Bill which have been properly condemned by the Irish Unionist Press and the Irish Unionist Primate exist in the system of government both seek to maintain. It would, according to Archbishop Crozier, be a degradation of the status of Irishmen to accept a measure which denied them an army, a navy, the power to defend their shipping and their ports, the full control of their Customs and Excise; which gave to another nation the power to collect their taxes and to decide how much of them should be returned. It is a degradation of the status of Irishmen that they should accept such restrictions on their liberty. I shall agree, provided Archbishop Crozier agrees, that geography does not change the principle. If it be a degradation to the status of Irishmen that they should be thus restricted in College Green, it is a degradation to the status of Irishmen that they should now be so restricted from Westminster.
The measure is no arrangement between nations. It recognises no Irish nation. It might equally apply to the latest British settlement on a South Sea Island. It satisfies no claim of the Irish nationalism whose roots are in Tara, or the Irish nationalism which Molyneux first made articulate. If it passes into law it may alter the complexion of the support of the status quo, but it will not alter the complexion of Irish Nationalism. New conditions demand new policies to suit them, but they cannot change the verities. If the Irish nation be not a fable, no readjustment of foreign government in Ireland can change its ideals. If it be a fable, as a few believe and many pretend to believe, it is the most potent fable in modern history. For through consecutive centuries men have suffered poverty, oppression, exile, chains and death in preference to its renunciation.
The Bill does not alter the status of Irishmen by an inch. They remain under its provisions as impotent to affect British Imperial policy as they are at present. They remain, in effect, as powerless to control their money and to enforce their own will as they are now. England continues to hold the Irish purse by collecting our revenues, paying them into her Treasury, and vetoing their disbursement. England continues to control our development by her power of annulling, altering and amending our expressed will and legislating on our affairs irrespective of our wishes. Stripped of the trappings in which partisans seek to array it, ‘the Irish Parliament’ is revealed an Advisory Committee to the British Government in Ireland—a device, necessitated by time, to govern Ireland under the Act of Union through the majority rather than through the minority. Hence, the uproar in the minority camp.
I do not fear the device as an Irish nationalist. The ideals of nationalism are not to be bought and sold. If the Bill be amended to give Ireland real control of her soil and taxes and power of finality in her legislation, I shall welcome its passage as a measure for the improvement of conditions in Ireland and a step towards clearing the way to a final settlement between two nations. If the Irish opponents of this measure, whose opposition to it is based upon desire, whatever the motive, to keep this country permanently under the direct government of England, are sincere in their profession that rather than accept it they would prefer to accept a sovereign legislature, they can impress their Nationalist fellow-countrymen with their sincerity and patriotism, while upholding their principle of opposition to the enactment of the measure, joining to secure its amendment in detail. By such a policy, whether they succeed or fail in opposition to the principle of the Bill, they can secure respect for honesty of conviction from their compatriots. If they succeed, they succeed without taint. If they fail, they fail with honour. It can never be urged against them that when they found they could not prevent their fellow-countrymen from drinking at a muddy stream, they stirred up the mud in effort to choke them.
It is easy for a Nationalist to say ‘If I were a Unionist I would not do this,’ or for a Unionist to say ‘If I were a Nationalist I would not do that.’ It is easier to imagine we can see through the other man’s spectacles than to fit them to our eyes. But, with this allowance, it is not hard for any Irish Nationalist to read in Mr. Balfour’s speech such a sentence as this without indignation that no Irish Unionist politician who listened to him, and that no Irish Unionist journalist who commented on the speech, thought it called for protest—‘What,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘is there in the Bill to prevent the Irish Parliament using Irish taxation for the purpose of helping the industries of Ireland to the detriment of the great commercial centres of this country?’ There is much in the Bill to prevent it. But, here, that is not the question. Does Irish Unionism hold as an argument consistent with the ‘status of Irishmen,’ an Englishman’s declaration, that Ireland must not be permitted to use her own money to help herself? The woollen manufacture of Ireland was destroyed, in 1698, by England on petition from English manufacturers, that Irish competition was ‘detrimental’ to them. In 1912 Mr. Balfour, in the same spirit, repeats the claim for representing Irish industry in England’s interest. How any Irishman can reconcile it with his conscience to agree that his country should be artificially depressed in England’s commercial interest must be reckoned in the mysteries.
When Mr. Balfour comes to outline the alternative Home Rule scheme that his speech and those speeches of Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Walter Long and Mr. William Moore foreshadow, I have no doubt that this sentence will be found to be no more than the usual party appeal to the groundling. But the fact will not be altered that it was made without eliciting condemnation from the official spokesmen of Irish Unionism.
The curse of Ireland has been, and is, the dependence of her people north and south of the Boyne on English Party Politicians. The semi-alliance of the Southern with the English Liberal does not date from the day when Mr. Parnell forced the Liberal Party to put Home Rule in their programme. It dates from the advent of Charles James Fox to power. The alliance of the Northern with the English Tory stretches back not quite so long. As a consequence, measures affecting Ireland have been, and are still, mainly judged in Ireland not by Irish standards, but by those set up for us by English party. We all know the type of Irish Home Ruler who speaks of the English Conservatives as ‘the English,’ and who writes of the English Liberals as ‘the Liberals.’ He is always before our eyes in the person of a prominent member of the Parliamentary Party. We all know, too, if Mr. Balfour fathered a Home Rule Bill that no Synod of the Church of Ireland would be invited to condemn it by those exponents of clericalism in politics, who profess to fear that Catholic churchmen would politically dominate the Catholic laity under Home Rule.
Is it not infinitely degrading to the common sense as well as to the status of Irishmen that they should discuss their own affairs from the standpoints of English party? If there be sound arguments against Home Rule, they are to be urged from the standpoint of Ireland’s interest. As yet I have heard none. I have heard it foretold that an Irish Parliament will persecute and plunder men because of their religious convictions—and I have seen it stated by the same people that the hapless minority which must inevitably suffer persecution under Home Rule is strong enough to face and beat the British Empire in arms. With scaremongers and fools there can be no reasoning.
It is possible Irish Unionist opposition may defeat the present Home Rule Bill. I do not think it likely. But what then? It is no political secret that the majority of the English Tories were prepared to adopt Home Rule eight years ago, and that their leaders assented to it at the abortive Conference of 1910. The Tory Cabinet, which will then succeed Mr. Asquith, will introduce and pass Home Rule with as little reference to the feeling of Irish Unionism as it showed when it introduced and passed the County Councils Bill. All that will have happened is that Irish Unionism will have spent its strength for English party. It will have lost prestige and opportunity. The opportunity is with it now. It can mould and shape Home Rule into a fair and workable measure of reform by initiating or supporting in committee on the Bill amendments removing restrictions and increasing powers. Will it support the claim of England to continue to collect our taxes and alter our legislation under a Home Rule scheme, and swallowing the professions it is making now, pretend to believe that Home Rule with such powers withheld is more consonant with the status of Irishmen than a Home Rule that confers them? It can, without faltering in its opposition to the enactment of the Bill, make certain that if it be enacted it will maintain this country’s dignity. Will it do that, or will it prove all its professions of preference for a full measure to a halting one mere party falsehood designed to help one English section to oust the other? Its choice is the choice between Irish patriotism and English party.