A HUMDRUM IRELAND.
IN" A Leap in the Dark," the powerful pamphlet full of argument, epigram, and historical learning, which the Oxford Professor of English Law has just published against Home-rule, be directs a few lucid pages to one point which has hitherto almost escaped popular attention. The idea of those sincere Gladstonians who know nothing of Ireland is that the Irish, once possessed of a Parlia- • ment of their own, will devote themselves to their own affairs, will send up to Dublin practical men as representa- tives, and will earnestly try to remedy what they conceive to be their own great local grievances. They will not care much about British politics or the affairs of the Empire, but will set themselves to work in the humdrum yet vigorous way in which alone great social improvements can be carried out. They will not be " gas and water " men precisely, but they will legislate very much as Denmark does, or Massachusetts. This is undoubtedly the view of the average British elector, who conceives that Irishmen are only noisy because they are not free, and that, once permitted to do their own business, they will do it attentively ; and it lies so deep in the mind of Mr. Gladstone, that he even imagines that if the Irish Members are left in their full strength in the House of Commons, they will make things easy for Britain by not attending. They will all be preoccupied, he thinks, with their own confused affairs. In consequence, it is alleged, the Members who now represent Ireland in the House of Commons, and who provide at least one great argument against Home-rule, will be superseded by a wholly new class,—business-men who will devote themselves for a short Session every year to the national internal work, and who will speedily make of Ireland if not a paradise, a very comfortable place. Mr. Dicey, in one of his chapters, addresses himself specially to this argument, with which, if it were only well-founded, he would have much sympathy, and shows that it is de- stroyed by the proposal to retain the Irish Members in Westminster. Their seats will be the attraction of pro- fessional politicians, their work will enable the Irish Mem- bers to indulge in their intellectual passions—" manage- ment, diplomacy, and rhetoric," and they will be the real leaders of the Irish people. They will therefore govern Ireland, more especially as the humdrum, efficient business-men cannot waste time in London, and Ireland cannot sustain two sets of representatives. The direct effect therefore of the double representation will be that Ireland loses the one hope for herself that, as arising from Home-rule, could influence her graver English friends ; that she will be represented at home and abroad by the Healys and Dillons and Sextons and O'Connors ; and that Englishmen, instead of being relieved of Irish pro- fessional politicians, will be governed by them still, with this aggravation, that they will be voting for loans, taxes, and politics with which their own people have no concern, and on which, therefore, their votes can always be used to extort bargains for Ireland,—that is, larger slices of inde- pendence, relief Bills from debts due to Britain, and guarantees for Irish loans :—" Irishmen will wish for an Irish army ; they will wish for a protective policy ; they will desire that Ireland shall play a part in foreign affairs, and will claim for her at least the independence of such a colony as Victoria How is Home-rule to be made a reality ? By one method only : that is, by the freest use of those arts of intrigue and obstruction by which Home- rule will have been gained. But for the carrying out of such a policy the agitators and intriguers who for the last twenty years have weakened and degraded the Imperial Parliament are the proper agents. For this work they, and they alone, are fit. The quiet, industrious, stay-at- home merchants or lawyers, who might be sent to Dublin for a month or two in the year to manage Irish business on business-like principles, will not be sent to Westminster to hold the balance between English parties. They can- not leave their everyday work ; wore they willing to for- sake their own business, they are not the men to conduct with success the parliamentary game of brag, obstruction, and finesse. Keep, in short, the Irish Members at West- minster, and you ensure the supremacy in Ireland of pro- fessional politicians." We shall be governed, and Ireland will be governed, by men of whom the very best that can be said is that, while they have no constructive ability, and little but rhetoric to contribute to debate, they possess in a high degree the faculties, the arts, and the political unscrupulousness of diplomatists from Southern and Eastern Europe.
We cannot conceive where the answer to this argument is to be found ; and Mr. Dicey might have strengthened it by another consideration,—the nature, alike for good and evil, of the national character. The Irish may be anything, but they cannot be humdrum plodders. They are not attracted by men like Peel, but by men like O'Connell. In their long list of leaders, a list of which in many respects they may be proud, we can recall no man of the true governing type, — the type which can remould the institutions of a country, and make of a poor and anarchical State a prosperous and orderly community. Parnell could govern in one way strongly enough ; but he had no constructive faculty ; he took his great social weapon from Mr. Davitt ; and except in suggesting now and then a new moratorium for rent- payers, he had no fertility of resource. Moreover, Parnell can never have been really loved in Ireland, or he could never have been deserted as he was at Mr. Gladstone's bidding. The best men the Irish will elect will be rhetoricians ; the worst, unscrupulous intriguers ; the solid men who make Parliaments useful for other things than displays of eloquence, failing entirely to attract. We are not blaming the Irish, be it understood, for this. We should as soon blame Frenchmen for being logical. To every race its own gifts ; and the Irish crowd, which is carried away by the windiest of semi-poetical rhetoricians, will catch the most remote allusion in his speeches, will feel his pathos, and be shaken into laughter by his humour in a way the slow- witted Saxon could never rival. That peculiarity of nature is, however, fatal to any hope, however distant, of a hum- drum Ireland ; and there is another one beside. An Irishman is not an Englishman or a Dutchman, who wants, first of all, to be comfortable, but a man who thirsts for distinc- tion, prominence, deference, both for himself and his country. He wishes Ireland to be recognised as some- thing besides a geographical expression, as a nation with a place in Europe, a place, if possible, of some importance; but if not, then at least of some visibility. He would prefer the position of Greece to that of Holland, and had rather Ireland were Belgium, with her international dangers and therefore international value, than Sweden with her success and out-of-the-wayishness. A decoration is to an Irishman a delight, even if it comes only from the Pope ; and the bribes which carried the Union were ex- pressed in titles much more than in solid cash. Even an Irish poet would be loyal if he were made Laureate, and one who was acknowledged by all mankind as great would be happy and easy in his mind, although he starved. It is not precisely vanity which influences the Irishman, but rather the feeling, shared also by Frenchmen, that life is not life for himself or his country if he is indistinguish- able in the crowd. Not to be somebody is to a French- man or an Irishman to be nobody, and to be nobody is not to exist. The French would rather be governed badly by a man with a genius for display and phrase-making, than well by an insignificant, or still worse, a smug man, intent merely on tradesmanlike results. There is no need to despise the character ; for the Parisian, like the Persian who is so like him, has qualities of his own, which the effective races are without ; and if in the Irishman self- assertiveness is unusually conspicuous, that is, in part, only a recoil from an unfortunate history. The Catholic Celt has been too much suppressed, and being suppressed and sensitive, writhes under the consciousness of an unjust contempt. " If," said an Italian gentleman the other day, " you two peoples only respected each other, you would soon be friends;" but that is just what does not happen. The recoil is to be expected ; but one consequence of it is that those who are moved by it will never remain content with humdrum legislation. The Irish who are of this type will seek men who make Ireland visible in Westminster, even if it be only by giving annoyance to those heavy Britishers, and will be most interested of all in efforts to secure continental importance, which can be secured only in one way, by opposing or impeding the action of Great Britain. Acting with Great Britain, Ireland is lost, but acting against her, she will be welcomed by every enemy of the Empire, and treated as if of the first im- portance to the world. It is natural enough ; a conscious grain of sand wishing for separate recognition would always fly into the eye ; but the fact helps to destroy all hope, if Ireland is represented at Westminster, of her being governed by humdrum people devoted to securing just laws, good sanitation, and material prosperity. We do not wonder at all at the little revolt of Wednesday against the restriction on Irish right to deal with foreigners. Nothing would please Irishmen better than to decree, just when Great Britain was vexed with France or America, that all Americans and Frenchmen were citizens of Ireland, and entitled as such to seats, if elected, in the Irish House of Commons. It would be only a protest, and would not overbalance the taking of one ship at sea ; but it would produce a sensa- tion all over the world and call attention to Ireland, and those are the things without which Irishmen are not content. They would be a great deal more interested in an incident like that, which would call out a hundred articles, than in any project for draining bogs, and would be much more inclined to elect its author than the best of hydraulic engineers. The Irish, in short, are theatric by nature ; and that being their form of enjoyment, they will seek it, if the Ninth Clause is passed, out of the many opportunies that clause will afford, and sacri- fice to their taste their most urgent and permanent interests. They do, in fact, at this moment elect men for the fight with England, and not men who care for improving by non-showy means their permanent pros- perity. The French would do just the same thing, but that the French alone among Celts have a mathe- matical side to their heads which, when affairs are serious, prevents their deceiving themselves, and makes them cry out, with a sort of intellectual anger, that two plus two are not five. No Irishman, when his brain is hot, is ever quite sure of that.
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