MR. HALDANE ON THE EVOLUTION OF AN ANGLO-IRISH CONSTITUTION.
MR. HALDANE, M.P. for Haddingtonshire, con- tributed to last week's Speaker an ingenious article on "Home-rule and Imperial Supremacy," the gist of which was that "the extent to which the title to legislate for Ireland will be asserted in practice by the Imperial Parliament, is a question which we are not called upon to answer, and ought not to try to answer. The practice will define itself according to the necessities of the period, and may vary as the periods succeed each other. The genius of British politics demands that under this head the Con- stitution should remain unwritten. Home-rulers hope and believe that interference from Westminster will, not less in the interests of Westminster than in those of Ireland, become reduced to a vanishing point, and that a consti- tutional practice will spring up embodying this con- ception." "To what extent in a particular case on a particular date a particular number of years ahead, the power of the Imperial Parliament to legislate, will be a power capable of constitutional exercise, we do not say, and from the nature of the case cannot say. All we know is that that power will be there ; but that if we are right in our belief in the efficiency for good of Home-rule, it will no more be constitutional to put it in force, than it will be necessary or desirable. Meantime, we do not tie our hands." In other words, Mr. Haldane hopes that the desire of the Irish Parliament not to provoke any exer- cise of this power of legislating over its head by the Imperial Parliament, will be so strong, as to make the Irish Parliament very careful and moderate in all it does whenever it approaches subjects on which the Imperial Parliament would be justly sensitive ; and that the Imperial Parliament will in its turn be so anxious not to meddle needlessly with the Irish Parliament, that it will exhaust all the resources at its disposal, or at the disposal of the Imperial Administration, for inducing the Irish Parliament and Administration to correct their own blunders without any official interference from West- minster, so that, whenever an emergency arises, it will be dealt with so sagaciously and temperately as to avoid any necessity for formal and humiliating dictation on the part of the supreme Parliament, of the kind requisite to enforce its will on the subordinate and statutory Parliament. What Mr. Haldane hopes, is that a great dread of constitutional collision will tend so to adjust the relations of the two Powers, as to make both of them chary of any audacious use of their abstract and theoretic rights, so that the power of the supreme Parliament to overrule may operate far more in the way of rendering any actual interference "unnecessary, than in the way of checking excesses actually committed. Well, that may fairly be called a singularly sanguine hope of Mr. Haldane's, when we look at the actual condi- tion of Ireland, and the actual relation of parties in Great Britain to parties in Ireland. First we have Irish Nationalists divided into a good many sections, all com- peting with each other for the reputation of national enthusiasm and audacity in defying Great Britain. We have a great Ulster party bent on ignoring altogether the Nationalist claim to control them, and resolved to test the strength of its influence in this country so as to know on what amount of political sympathy it can rely. And we have two great English parties, one of them relying on Irish Nationalist support, and the other relying on the sympathy and support of the Presbyterians and loyal Catholics of the North-East of Ireland. These are political conditions almost as likely to favour extraordinary self-restraint and extraordinary reticence on the part of Irishmen and Englishmen, as the condition of a raging conflagration would be likely to favour the safety and insula- tion of a mass of gunpowder and dynamite. Here are men burning to emancipate themselves from what they will hold to be an ignominious yoke on one side, and men burning to exercise the brief authority they will have just wrested from England, after a fierce struggle, on the other hand ; and on this side of the water, here are great parties closely identi- fied with the two opposite sections of the Irish people : and yet we are told to expect a steady self-restraint, a liberal display of delicacy and tact, and an almost super- human disinterestedness, while vehement partisans in the United States and the Colonies are raising money and issuing orders for the purpose of spurring on the contest, and avenging what they regard as serious and bitter wrongs !
What Mr. Haldane desires to provide for, is that spirit of friendly compromise between Great Britain and Ireland which would minimise all causes of quarrel and misunder- standing on both sides. And it would not be unreasonable to look for such a spirit, if the Irish nation were really at one with itself, and were really more deeply interested in obtaining and making practical use of its own liberty, than in challenging and defying and measuring its strength with the people of the sister-island. But neither of these conditions is satisfied. A third, or nearly a third, of the Irish people would, to say the least, be rendered indefinitely more hostile than they now are to the political constitution under which they would live, by the new arrangements. And in the second place, the satisfaction taken in Home-rule by those who clamour for it, would hardly be satisfaction at all if it did not supply them with a multitude of opportunities for measuring their strength with England, and trailing their coat for England to tread upon. A third of the nation would be bent upon making truce altogether impossible, and the other two-thirds would enjoy it only so long as it was an exciting and sensational truce, always on the very edge of rupture, and always opening out occasions for political duels in which they would hope to make up by superior address and ingenuity for the greater strength of the sister-island. A great portion of Ulster would be wholly disloyal so long as Home-rule was enforced, and the rest of Ireland would wish to preserve it and work it only so long as it provided them with plenty of knock-down fights andopportunities for violent invective. What hope could there be of suppressing all overt quarrels, and so steering the alliance as to estab- lish a constitutional precedent against explosions of jealousy and trials of strength, when about a million and a half of the sturdiest members of the Irish race were smarting under the humiliation of the terms to which they had been compelled to submit, while the rest took a great deal more pleasure in indulging themselves in the airs of independence and stirring us up to impatience and wrath, than they would in attenuating all the causes of dispute, and attaining a modus vivendi which would reduce disagreement to a minimum ? Mr. Haldane is attributing his Scotch canniness to Ireland. Now, a certain number of the Irish people have a large share of it, but they are the people of the North-East of the island, who, far from wishing to make the supposed arrangement work smoothly, would be delighted to heighten the friction till the constitution broke down altogether. And the remainder, far from being canny in the sense of postponing sentiment to solid interest, would sacrifice solid interest almost without any consciousness of what they were doing, to the delights of a political boxing- match or a political intrigue. Cannot Mr. Haldane see in the present attitude of -Ulster on the one hand, and the present feuds between the Paniellites and Anti-Parnellites on the other, what Irish Home-rule would come to,— namely, serious and businesslike resistance by some, and a devil-may-carishness of anarchy, half passion and half noisy braggadocio, in others ? There are two great securities against that spirit of compromise for which Mr. Haldane hopes. One is, that the richest and most practical part of the Irish people desire to make the compromise impossible. The other is, that the majority of the Irish people do not enjoy a sedate and prudent political life, and do enjoy agitation, conspiracy, intrigue, conflict, effervescence. Mr. Haldane wants to take the ballast out of the hold in order to prevent the ship from rolling ! So soon as the ballast is gone, the ship will roll more than ever, and probably fill and founder. If Irishmen are ever to become absorbed in pursuing commercial prosperity, they must be steadied by a " strong " government, which dis- countenances that disposition for a shindy in which the majority of them find so overwhelming an attraction ; and that strong government, moreover, will not be really strong, unless it secures the hearty respect, though not necessarily, and indeed not always, the willing co-operation, of the most utilitarian section of the Irish people. An unwritten Constitution, which develops itself by a sort of tentative instinct, may be a very good kind of Constitution for a people who possess the tentative instinct, and who know the value of peace and quietness. But where that instinct is totally wanting, or, so far as it exists, is totally opposed to the Constitution which is to be developed, that higgling of the political market which is the chief modus operandi of evolution, becomes an organised opportunity for strife, and, indeed, a positive security for failure.
Previous page
