THE HOME-RULERS' DISAVOWAL OF SEPARATISM.
SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, speaking at the Holborn Restaurant on Thursday, gave expression to the annoy- ance so generally felt by the Home-rule Party at being called the " Separatist Party." They, he says, are the true Unionists. It is those who will concede nothing to the Home-rule policy in Ireland who are really doing what is most likely to alienate the two islands. The object of the Home-rulers is to satisfy Irish claims, to content Ireland, and to draw the Irish and English peoples together in feelings of true unity and con- cord. This has been often said by the Home-rulers, by none more eloquently than by Mr. Gladstone ; and we have no doubt that there are a good many among them who at all events really hope,—we can hardly think that there are many who firmly believe,—that the result of giving Ireland a sepa- rate Legislature and separate Administration will be to cement the Union between Ireland and Great Britain. We do not at all doubt that this is the generous hope of Mr. Gladstone, and of some of the eagerest of his followers, though we are quite sure that if we could see into the minds of many of them,—Sir William Harcourt's, for example,—we should find that that hope hardly existed at all, and that they support Home-rule only as a mode of exhausting conciliatory expedients and justifying adequately an ultimate resort to force. Still, even this section of the Home-rule Party is not Separatist in its ultimate aims. It is a section which thinks that you must "retire in order to leap the better ;" but the retire- ment is not intended to lead to Separation, but to a further resort to force. So far as we know, there are no Home-rulers among the English party who really desire Separation. The only justification for calling them "Separatists,"—and it is not a word we approve, and if we have ever used it of them it is only through want of sufficient care,—is not that any of them wish for Separation,—we believe they are at heart more utterly set against it, under all conceivable circumstances, than even we are,—but that what they advocate, rationally con-
sidered, leads nowhither except to Separation. Let us consider for a moment the utter hopelessness of the prospect if Home-rule were ever granted to Ireland, not merely in the form proposed by Mr. Gladstone, but in any form at all resembling it.
In the first place, it involves either the exclusion of Ireland from representation at Westminster, or its inclusion. Sir Charles Russell, we suppose, contemplates its inclusion, for he says: —"As an Irishman myself, I hold that my fellow-countrymen claim too large a share in the greatness of the Kingdom, and have done too much for the purpose of building it up, to desire to lose or imperil their share in its glories." Well, that is hardly consistent with support of Mr. Gladstone's plan. Irish- men cannot care much for "the glories" of an Empire whose administration they are willing to confide entirely to the hands of British representatives. We conclude, therefore, that Sir Charles Russell contemplates the inclusion of Irish representa- tives at Westminster, as well as the exclusion of all British representatives in Dublin. The Irish would be encouraged to build up a separate State in Dublin, with native sympathies and a distinct genius of its own, and then to come over, full of their new aspirations and sympathies, to take part in determining the policy of an Empire in which, on any question on which Irishmen felt a purely Irish bias, they would count for little, and would therefore regard themselves as alien to the sympathies of the majority. How is it possible to foster, on the one hand, to the very uttermost a local nationalism, and yet not subject, on the other hand, that local nationalism to the bitterest sense of wrong when it came to measure itself against a more powerful British nationalism ? In cases like the composite Austrian Empire, there is, if not equality, at least something like a fair balance between the various elements, just as there is in the United States. But no case can be produced of the harmonious working of Federalism where the elements of Federalism are so unequally balanced as between Great Britain and Ireland. If, on the other hand, Ireland is to be excluded from any share in the legislation and administration of the Empire, as Mr. Glad- stone proposed, is it conceivable for a moment that the pride in the glories of the Empire of which Sir Charles Russell speaks, should continue to exist ?
But, in the next place, Ireland is not wholly of one mind. It has two quite distinct minds. And these two minds have been so long engaged in the bitterest quarrels, that it is childish to expect them to be easily reconciled, or to conceive that the appeal will not continue to be made to the more powerful island to judge between the two. If the quarrels of Ulster and the other three provinces are to be fought out at Westminster, Westminster will be occupied more than ever with the absorbing subject of Ireland. If they are not to be fought out at Westminster, the greatest danger which threatens the internal harmony of the Kingdom will be ex- cluded from the sphere of Parliamentary discussion.
In the third place, any Home-rule plan which is not Separa- tion in all but name, will involve the new birth of scores of most delicate questions between the two islands, questions of relative dignity, of jurisdiction, of legal right, of equity, of financial convenience, of administrative courtesy, of mutual regard for each other's safety. These are the kind of ques- tions which of all others are most difficult to settle between the oldest and beet-tempered allies ; but they are just the questions on which of all others, if our experience of Ireland in the past is any guide to the future, the Irish will be sensitive even to unreason, and the English probably incon- siderate even to brutality. It seems to us absolutely impossible that, however grateful the Irish people might think themselves for the grant of Home-rule, a single year would elapse before they would be utterly infuriated at the interpretation put on the meaning of the new and most delicate relations into which they had entered, by their stronger neighbour. And the whole people would catch fire if they held that the Irish Government had been treated with indignity by the British Government. For our own part, we can as soon imagine an atmosphere impregnated with coal-gas not ex- ploding under the electric flash, as the relation proposed between England and Ireland existing for a year without an outbreak of worse animosity between the two countries than has ever yet been in existence. Irish sensitiveness is all the greater, and quite naturally all the greater, for the Irish consciousness of inferiority of power. British callous- ness is all the greater for the British sense of superiority of power. The two islands would come to loggerheads in half a year.
For all these reasons, we say that nothing seems to us so unreasonable as the horror of Separation which the friends of Home-rule display. If peace is to be restored by the loosening of the tie between Great Britain and Ireland, the more it is loosened the better. Union of the Crowns only, with complete power to the Sovereign of Ireland to remain neutral even though the Sovereign of Great Britain should go to war, and to go to war even though the Sovereign of Great Britain remained neutral, might perhaps endure for a time, always supposing that Ulster could really identify herself with the rest of Ireland. But of Home-rule such as Sir Charles Russell conceives it, we can only think as an expedient for fomenting new quarrels far more deadly than any likely to result from the Separation which he so vehemently condemns.
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