THE IRISH RIOTS AND SELF-DECEPTION.
OME excellent people with the best intentions are once more trying politically to harness the rising tide of bitterness and strife in Ireland, and make it prove the need for what is called a policy of conciliation, conference, and consent. The irreconcilability of North-East Ulster is pointed to on the one hand, and the unfiuctuating demand of the Nationalists for Home Rule on the other, and we are asked what could be more statesmanlike and more characteristically British than to admit that such extremes can never live side by side, at least so long as one of them is openly dissatisfied. A compromise must be effected between them, we are told, and then, and then alone, will there be peace in Ireland. This plan, even when the fact is not formally admitted, means, of course, consent to some modified form of Home Rule ; for no rational person supposes that Mr. Redmond and his Parliamentary followers would be content with anything that could not be plausibly, or for the purposes of political advertisement, graced with the name of Home Rule. The Unionist Party has been invited before now— it was actually invited by the Liberal Ministers—to join in a conference on Home Rule, and the proposal came to nothing because in the nature of things it could not come to anything unless the Unionist Party should be faithless to its trust. No one is more temperamentally inclined to compromise and moderation than we are, but this is not a case in which there is a place for compromise on the lines suggested. Compromise is possible only when two parties to an argument have a certain number of principles in common ; compromise then consists in an accommodation as to the balance of principles in dispute. But as between self-government for Ireland and an incorporating union for Ireland there is no common principle. Those who are advocating a conference are for the most part confessed Home Rulers who do not happen to like the present Home Rule Bill. Their demand is not only intelligible but highly respect- able ; they merely want a better form of Home Rule than they are at present offered. But when those who call themselves Unionists join in the demand it is as well to recall the simple facts of the situation. Those who have not really tried to face them, or have improperly grasped them, or have forgotten them, are the natural prey of solutions which are attractive just because they seem at first sight to serve the natural desire of all decent people to live at peace with their neighbours. The Observer, we notice, says :— " The olive branch was held out in the House of Lords. It is for the Government to accept it. It is up to ' them to call together a Conference and to evolve a plan by which the legitimate aspirations of Nationalist Ireland may be reconciled with the unquestioned right of the Ulster Loyalists nob to be thrust out of the Union without their own consent. . . . We epnnot compro- mise on principle ; we cannot and we will not desert the people of North-East Ulster and hand them over to those whom they regard as their deadly foes. But we will examine carefully and with sympathy any proposals for a national settlement of the Irish question which has in it the germs of peace and justice."
These are amiable words. They are likely enough to appeal to those who are weary of strife and riots in Ireland and whose convictions are not very strong, even if their minds are not in a state of fog ; for such men turn hungrily to the thought of concessions as the price of peace.
But we are greatly mistaken if a reconsideration of the facts, familiar though they are or ought to be, will not con- vince ninety-nine men out of a hundred who have not a blind prejudice in favour of Home Rule as an abstract theory that a policy of trying to reconcile irreconcilable things is bound to cause in the long run more bitter- ness and a more enduring state of unrest in Ireland. To begin with, the recent rioting in Londonderry and the previous riots near Belfast and Dublin are all the demonstrable outcome of the Home Rule Bill. When the Government came into power there was no open religious or racial strife in Ireland. Mr. Asquith's deal with Mr. Redmond over the Budget caused mutual suspicion to start to life again; the Protestants remem- bered all their old distrust of the Nationalists who aspired to rule over them, and the Nationalists regarded the Ulstermen with bitterness as the only obstacle in the way of a realization of their ambitions. To say that this state of things can be cured by applying to Ireland just a little less of the policy which has provoked the whole trouble is surely an argument of particular fatuity. What is wanted is the policy which for years, by gradual and secret growth, has been transforming the face of Ireland from a starved and depressed country into a prospering and hopeful country. It is not as though we had not had experience of self- government in Ireland to guide us. If we hadnot that experi- ence there might be an arguable case for trying Home Rule. But Home Rule has been tried, and it was abandoned because it was a failure. Pitt effected the legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland not out of any daredevilry or native perversity, but solely because other plans had caused confusion and bloodshed. We do not pretend even now that there is not a great deal still to be done for Ireland, but the Union is the only political scheme which has carried Ireland, however slowly, from strength to strength and has preserved peace and order. The massacres and horrors of 1798 I were not brought about by the Union but by Grattan's Parliament. The Union is not a perfect scheme sent from heaven, but it is the solvent of the greatest possible number of difficulties. Any form of self-govern- ment would throw into the arena all kinds of trouble which is at present ruled out of existence by the Union.
To give Orangemen and Nationalists freedom to carry on their vendetta without intervention from the central authority means a permanent state of civil war—not such civil war as is immediately threatened by the passage of the Home Rule Bill, of course, but nevertheless in some sort civil war. There is no more chance of their agreeing to live in perfect political amity than there is of Moslems and Hindus agreeing to do so in India. The jealousy of the rival creeds in Ireland is a fact to be faced. To think that the opportunity for long-enduring recrimination should be seriously proposed in the name of peace and quiet !
Since the introduction of land purchase in Ireland under the Union, the rapid stream of emigration has been checked ; the farmer has come to think more of his farming than of spectral and inherited political grievances; and by agricultural co-operation the whole machinery of his industry in numerous districts has become easy and smooth-running. Co-operation has brought about a new attitude towards Irish rural life. If there is no longer the eager flight to America, the same thing is true of the movement to the towns in Ireland; existence in the country is no longer assumed to be the final abrogation of the pride and rights of the natural man. Take a county like Donegal. Village life is becoming a conscious and self- respecting organism full of amenities and social reciprocity. Simultaneously with all this the literary talent of Ireland has blossomed in a manner unknown and unforeseen by the last generation. The true nationalism of Ireland—a characteristically Irish cult—has grown up under the Union. It may not acknowledge the Union or in any way celebrate it, but it is at least obvious that in these latter days of dawning prosperity inspiration has run more freely than under the old black cloud of furious resent- ment against England which hung over the times of famine and despair. Those who imagine that a reversal of the system under which these advantages have developed, and under which they have lately shown signs of developing far more rapidly than ever before, will be a kind of water- ing of the crop, are deceiving themselves.
For what shape could any modified form of self- government for Ireland take ? The Irish Councils Bill was rejected, and there is no reason to suppose that it would satisfy Nationalists better to-day than it did at the time of its introduction. Mr. William O'Brien, who held a great meeting at Cork on Friday week, frankly admitted that what he and his friends wanted was better financial treatment for Ireland. Lord Dunraven has said the same thing. Because the Land Conference led to the passing of the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903 they think that a Conference on Home Rule now will also have some magical effect, as though the two questions were in pan i materia. But we ask, again, what shape could a modified form of Home R ule take? If the legislative Union were retained the Nationalists would never be satisfied, and if it were not retained it would be quite impossible to give the Nationalists or the All-for- Ireland League the financial treatment they demand so long as any pretence were kept up of behaving with elementary justice to the taxpayers of England, Wales, and Scotland. Is it being said secretly by anyone that the taxpayers of England, Wales, and Scotland do not matter, and that it is nobody's business to guard the interests of these unfortu- nate people ?
Apart from the All-for-Ireland League the demand for a conference comes from Federalists who are trying to seize a new opportunity for making a beginning of their favourite scheme of minor disruption. But it is to be noted that Federalists, while they require more freedom to do what they like, also—even if they do not expressly admit it—require a larger contribution than over from the common purse. The present Home Rule Bill provides for a grant in money and money's worth (through remitted responsibility for Imperial services and so on) of about £6,000,000 a year. But the simple fact must be faced by those who would not hopelessly deceive themselves that federalism means even larger payments than this out of the common purse. Scotland. and Wales, as well as Ireland, under any federal scheme, would justly enough demand grants as large in pro- portion as that given to Ireland. The centrifugal motive and the financial motive (which is centripetal) would pull in opposite directions and destroy each other. In the end, after much expense and a great loss of political energy, the supervision of a central Treasury would have to be re-established. If Ireland, Scotland, and. Wales break away from the policy which provides a common purse, they cannot, in short, expect to draw more money than before. So long as the common purse is acknowledged, English taxpayers take a pride, if not exactly a pleasure, in helping their poorer relations. But if the poorer relations renounce the control which the theory of the common purse postulates, Englishmen will simply refuse—and they will be perfectly right—to foot bills of an indefinite amount. Land purchase in Ireland was a fruit of the common purse ; it is inconceivable that Englishmen will go on buying land for Irishmen—for that is what land purchase comes to—if Ireland successfully renounces British control.
To sum up. Those who talk as though the determined people of Derry, for example, who annually celebrate the relief of their besieged town in 1689, and who still passion- ately repeat the phrase "No Surrender 1" handed down to them from those days, can be somehow induced by a conference to trust themselves to the predominant political influence in Ireland of the rival creed which they then resisted, are deceiving themselves. And thoso who want to substitute for the present Home Rule Bill a different beginning of federalism in the conviction that federalism can be reconstructed out of a cen- tralized organism — though a. centralized organism is one in a later state of development than a federal organism—are also deceiving themselves. Finance alone forbids such a cast-back. Ireland, Wales, and Scotland would never consent willingly to have less money to spend than they have now, yet any system of federal finance that was not grossly unjust to Englishmen would place them in that position. There is only one plan for governing Ireland which is fair to Roman Catholic Irishmen and to Protestant Irishmen, and com- paratively fair also to Englishmen, and that is to maintain the Union. To suppose at this stage of affairs that the experience of a hundred years can be proved untrue at a. conference, and that the malaise of Ireland can be cured by applying a little less of the policy which has already produced. the riots of Londonderry, is the limit of self- deception.
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