MELAND AND HER DOCTORS.
MR. ISAAC BUTT and Mr. Chichester Forteseue do not merely differ as to the remedy for "Irish turbulence." They differ apparently as to its immediate causes, but it is worth noting that on this point the new Parliamentary champion of Home Rule is as carefully vague, as the former Irish Secretary is carefully distinct. Mr. Chichester Fortescue in his speech at Bristol explained the causes of Irish turbulence as follows :— "What happened was this. Fenianism or agrarianism sprang up out of roots which lay deep in the past history of that country. Government had to deal with them according to its duty. Any Government, Liberal or Tory, had to punish the evil-doers. Those who suffered were at once considered as martyrs. Government had to employ the means of detection of crime at its command. The police detective was murdered, and his murderer was treated as a hero. Government had passed special laws of repression for special crime prevailing in certain districts, He himself, last year, and Lord Harting- ton this year, had had to do it. At once a senseless, and false, and mischievous, and criminal cry of oppression was raised in Ireland,—raised by those organs and mouthpieces of opinion which reached the great masses of the people ; and so the Government of the best intentions, and more than that, the Government that had done the most just deeds in Ireland, and redressed the greatest amount of old injustice, was repre- sented to the Irish people as an enemy and an oppressor." In other words, Mr. Portescue refers the disaffection which sets this vicious circle rolling to the past injustice which has sown in Irishmen a bitter disloyalty to the British Government. Mr. Butt will not concede that. He explicitly admits the turbulence of the Irish people, but says,—and this is neces- sary to his argument, for the special remedy he proposes,— that turbulence is owing to "bad laws," i.e., bad exist- ing laws, and not merely to a history of misgovernment. " Bad laws," he said at Glasgow on Tuesday, " create discontent ; discontent creates crime ; crime is used again to justify severity ; severity provokes new crime. New crime provokes severity still more atrocious ; and therefore in this evil circle of injustice and revenge between the Government and the people, will the country be destroyed. How are you to cut that evil circle ? Is it by increasing it, by adding link after link ? No, but by going back to the beginning, by cutting off the sources, by removing bad laws, by satisfying and contenting the people." But then Mr. Butt suddenly remem- bers that this is precisely what Mr. Gladstone's Government has been and is doing, and as it is his object to show that the United Parliament itself is the root of mischief, and not the United Parliament's acts, he is in a difficulty, and is compelled to depreciate the Church and Land Acts as betraying "the marks of anti-Irish prejudice "; and then, reluctantly con- ceding that they might be assumed as, on the whole, boons to Ireland, he effects a diversion as rapidly as possible from the subject, by asserting that, as Fenianism led to the Church and Land Acts, the Irish are taught by these Acts the wretched lesson that the more they rebel the more good things they will get,—an argument perfectly reasonable from the Conservatives who object to consider Irish griev- ances at all while Irishmen are so violent, but scarcely decent in the mouth of a man who had just been saying that "bad laws" were the natural roots of that violence, and that bad laws should be rooted out. What, then, would Mr. Butt recommend to the Irish Parliament if he got it ? Would he advise it to refuse a radical reform, lest it should be said that violence was rewarded by justice ? And if not, where is the difference between a United Parliament removing a deep-seated grievance by wise legislation and a Local Parliament doing the same thing ? The truth is, Mr. Butt himself does not see the difference, but it is necessary to his case to depreciate the value of justice to Ireland when it is the gift of a United Parliament. He would fain have twice as many bad existing laws to cite as the proofs of our misgovernment as he has. He can, however, only cite the Irish Protection for Life and Property Act and the Westmeath Act as examples of bad laws, and they, as he knows very well, are examples of a kind of law which an Irish Republic would pass with far more stern rapidity than a British Government. As Mr. Chichester Portescne appositely remarked, the American Republic has only recently suspended the Habeas Corpus Act in a region fifty times as large as Westmeath amidst general approval. When a country is lawless the most patriotic government is apt to be the sternest. A Parliament in Dublin would put down agrarian murders and con- spiracy with an iron hand, compared with which that of the United Parliament is soft as velvet. His only specimens of the "bad laws "in which, as he says, discontent arises, are, then, Acts which would undoubtedly be worse, so long as they were needed, under a local government. And here lies the only strong point,—which Mr. Butt, however, did not venture to make,—for Home Rule. Once let Ireland have only herself to blame for severity towards Irish crime, and the people who screened and protected it would no longer be thought distinctively patriotic ; they might still be a political faction opposed to the constitution, and in favour of revolution, but they would no longer be regarded as a distinctively Irish patty; they would be what the Italian banditti became when Italy was once freed from the foreigner,—not, half-patriots and half-robbers, but at best only half-revolutionists and half-robbers. Now, a revolutionist is not so attractive to the popular mind, —certainly not to the Irish popular mind,—as a patriot ; and, therefore, no doubt it would be a gain to the cause of order that the party opposed to order would be fighting against a purely native authority, instead of an authority appointed from London. So much we admit to Mr. Butt, that laws, whether good or bad, would have a certain element of advan- tage in Ireland from being purely Irish. All we deny is that this advantage would be either so great or so lasting as to be of much importance when weighed against the welfare and union of an empire. To good laws Ireland has a right, whether enacted in Dublin or London. To native laws, in the narrower sense, she has no right, so long as they endanger the solidity and strength of the Empire. And it must be clear to all the world, that the effect of good laws passed by a United Parliament should be fairly tried, before any true Irish patriot proposes to try the experiment, doubtful and dangerous in the highest degree both for Ireland and for the other kingdoms to be disunited from it, of disunion,
which, no doubt, means ultimately complete separation. Clearly, if it be ° bad laws,' as Mr. Butt himself asserts, that cause the discontent, the right moment in which to propose a rash and kill-or-cure remedy is not that in which the United Parliament itself has taken seriously in hand the work of abolishing them and substituting good laws in their place.
For Mr. Butt's remedy does mean ultimate and pro- bably early complete separation, not a mere local Parliament. A local Parliament for Ireland would, of course, stimulate and strengthen in a hundred different forms the desire of Irishmen for a typical policy and government of their own, and put it, as it were, within easy reach. For the very topics on which Ireland is now most sensitive to her differences from England are topics not of local Irish, but of Imperial feeling and policy ;—her sympathy, for instance, with Prance in the late war made the anti-Gallican cry which at first came from England utterly hateful to her ; her sympathy with the Pope made the English delight in the capture of Rome an abomination to her ; and consequently, if ever the question of war or peace arises again for the Empire, we may be quite sure that this, the greatest and, for a federation, the most delicate of all questions, would be treated from an almost opposite point of view in Ire- land and in Great Britain ; and only imagine the effect in England of an Irish Parliament's almost unanimous censure on our declaration of war Again, it is hardly conceivable that with the strong Irish prejudices as to native industries, the local Parliament would be content to leave to the Federal Parliament the great question of the tariff. It would claim on that subject as much liberty as the colonies which are per- mitted to tax British goods. Yet if that were once granted, Ire- land would be entering into separate commercial treaties with half the countries of Europe, and be involved in a totally distinct network of foreign engagements; and if it were not permitted, an agitation would at once be set up for extending the jurisdiction of the local Parliament to the determination of the tariff. In short, a local Irish Parliament would be a new and powerful lever with which to agitate for a totally distinct policy,—in other words, for separation. Nay, we contend that it would be far more desirable in the interest of both countries to separate absolutely and wholly than to attempt a federation. Mr. Butt points to the success of a federation in Switzerland, Austria, the United States, Canada. But in Austria at least, the success is at present much more. like failure, and just for the very reason for which it would be a failure with us,—that the German element and the Magyar and Slavic elements are too divergent in genius for hearty co-operation. In the United States this is equally true as regards the groups of States of really divergent genius, the Northern and the Southern ; and if the difficulty be conquered, it will only be by crushing the root of the divergence. In Switzerland and Canada there has been no real trial of the proposed experiment. These States are united by the strong cohesion of common dangers, and have not been tried by the bitter jealousies arising out of great disparity of force and great divergence of sympathy. In Switzerland, it is true, there are both Catholic and Protestant Cantons ; but the Cantons are too small to covet a national policy, indeed it has been the great care of the Federation itself to be ostentatiously neutral amidst all the struggles of Europe. Hence such a federation as is suggested between Great Britain and Ireland is taken entirely out of the category of these prece- dents. And what is most important of all, the very passion which makes the cry for Home Rule formidable, if it be for- midable, springs out of historic antecedents which render it cer- tain that it will grow, instead of collapsing, under the stimulus of hope. It is a Celtic, anti-British passion, in its very essence ; andwhatever its present strength, a Celtic, anti-British passion, with a parliamentary life to feed it, and a federal rivalry to inflame it, is perfectly certain not to abate, but to grow.
This movement, then, really means separation, if it means anything. And what evils are not involved in separation ?— to Irishmen, the loss of safety, of the aid of British wealth and. enterprise, of a wide political life, of varied careers, of an external authority in the internecine quarrels always on foot between the Protestant and Roman Catholic sections of the people,—in one word, of a share in a great Empire ; to Great Britain something of safety too,—for though the Irish Channel is hardly anywhere as narrow as the English at the Straits of Dover, yet if Ireland were foreign and hostile, there would be, at least, two long channels to be guarded instead of one, and there would be an incessant and wearing anxiety in Glasgow and Liver- pool (which might suffer so frightfully from any breach) as to ' our relations with Ireland,—and besides safety, a very great loss in variety of genius, when once we had ceased to have any national right in the most versatile and interesting, if the most unstable, character of which the United Kingdom can boast. There might be a gain in unity and solidity, it cannot be denied, but it would be at the cost of qualities that our dull and stolid populations sadly need.
Yet if we are to hold fast by the Union, as of course we shall, we cannot afford to disregard Mr. Chichester Fortescue's im- pressive warning, that "there are certain conditions which are necessary if this union with Ireland, he would not say is to be maintained, because, of course, they could maintain it, but is to be maintained, not by the will of the stronger, but by the consent and conviction of the weaker, and one of them is that the majority, which must always, of course, prevail in the Imperial Parliament, must show great consideration and re- spect for Irish interests and Irish feelings upon Irish domestic affairs, This is asking no more than what we have done, what we are doing, and what we would do for Scotland." Of course, Mr. Chichester Fortescue was referring to the ques- tion of education, and we must say that his wise and cautious warning on this head is terribly needed in the present temper of British Protestantism. We have made groat sacrifices of feeling in disestablishing the Protestant Church, and in giving Ireland a different land-law from that of either England or Scotland ; but this will be of comparatively little avail, if we are to insist on educating Ireland according to the principles of a great majority of Protestant Anglo-Saxons, and without any regard to those of the groat majority of Irish Celts. If there be a matter on which it is quite certain how Ireland would legislate for herself, were she inde- pendent, it is on this question of education. We are, no doubt, under a solemn obligation to protect the consciences of Irish Protestants, and to see that, even as regards the Catholics, the verdict of the people, not of the priests, de- termines the form of education. But these conditions once satisfied, if we are to insist on interpreting the wishes of the Catholic laity, not by their votes and their declarations, but by the inner oracles of our own Protestant hearts, we shall be doing our very best to play into Mr. Isaac Butt's hands. We shall be proclaiming aloud to Ireland that even in relation to the most purely Irish interests, we are incap- able of foregoing the right to meddle with mischievous bigotry in what does not concern ourselves.
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