AMERICA AND IRELAND.
TT is most natural that our American Allies, and in particular _11. those who are special svellwishers of this country, should interest themselves in the Irish question. They see hat Ireland is the only part of the British Empire in which we appear to be unable to provide a government which suits the governed, and, assuming that in a quarrel the big dog and the top dog must be in the wrong and the little dog in the right, they implore us to settle the Irish question offhand and to be as generous to Ireland as we have been to the rest of the Empire—to treat Ireland, in other words, as we desire that Poland should be treated, or Finland, or the Slav provinces of the Austrian Empire, or as we have always treated the oversea Dominions. Not only do we feel no annoyance at receiving this good advice, but we can assure our kinsmen across the Atlantic that for the vast majority of Englishmen and Scotsmen, and indeed we may say for the whole nation, they preach to the converted. Nothing would give us greater pleasure than to settle the Irish question, and to settle it on the lines which are implicit in the American admonitions. Like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, we say from the bottom of our hearts of the Irish problem : " It wearies us— Wu say it wearies you." The difficulty is not in accepting in principle the excellent general truths' that are prescribed to us, but in finding out how to apply them. We want to give Ireland what she wants. We want, that is, to give the majority of the Irish peqple what they ask for in the way of self-government, and to give it to them under the most generous conditions, but we do not want to give it in such a way as to do a great injustice to the Protestants of the homogeneous area known as North-East Ulster—an area which for the past three hundred years has had a special history. In North-East Ulster everything that prevails in the rest of Ireland is reversed. In the rest of Ireland the Roman Catholics are in a large majority. In North-East Ulster the Protestants arc in a large majority. In the rest of Ireland the people are largely of Celtic or Iberian origin. In North-East Ulster they are of non-Celtic Scottish or English origin. In the rest of Ireland they are a- people engaged in pastoral or agricultural pursuits, and averse from industrialism. In North-East Ulster the dominant interests of the population are industrial. In the rest of Ireland what occupy the mind of the people are politics and social life. In North-East Ulster the people are as keenly set upon industrial development as they are in any district in the West or Middle West of America.—The nearest thing in the United Kingdom to an American city is the city of Belfast.—Finally, the local majority in North-East Ulster wants to be let alone, to remain in the Union, and to be under the Parliament at Westminster as passionately as the rest of Ireland wants none of these things.
In these circumstances the just, the natural, and the appro- priate thing is surely to say to the Irish, as we have said over and over again in these columns : " Let the local majority in the big Irish area have what they want—the Home Rule Bill—and let it be put into operation with the full accord and blessing of Great Britain, and with the very generous subsidy with which we are willing to endow it. At the same time, let that part of Ireland in which the local majority loathes and detests the Home Rule Bill remain under the Parliament at Westminster." But unfortunately this very sensible and reasonable proposal, this " square deal " as our American friends would call it, is utterly rejected by the big Irish area. They tell us that Ireland shall never be divided, which means, in effect, that they do not care' to have Home Rule for them- selves unless they can dominate North-East Ulster. Instead of saying, as we might expect them to say : " We shall gain by establishing our Government in a homogeneous area with no false friends in it such as the Members for North-East Ulster would be," they say : " Unless we can have these thorns in the flesh, these unwilling guests at our banquet, we refuse to eat any banquet at all. Unless they are there to criticize the dinner, very possibly to throw it out of the window, and at any rate to propose hostile toasts and boo down our best-loved speakers, we refuse to have anything to do with the banquet—will die rather than eat our own dinners." Now it seems to us that the best way in which Americans could help us to get over the Irish difficulty would be for them to concentrate, not upon trying to coerce or convince North- East Ulster against its will, but upon persuading the Nationalists to see how foolish, unfair, and unreasonable is their policy, and to induce them to accept, not a half-cake, but a nine-tenths cake instead of no bread. Surely they ought to be able to point out to their Nationalist friends that, since Home Rule in based upon the demand that the will of the local majority shall prevail; it would be a very bad start for IrishseMgovern- ment to deny that right to North-East Ulster, to begin Ireland's national regeneration by painting up on their Parliament House on St: Stephen's Green : " What is sauce for the goose- is not sauce for the gander " • " Principles that are all right for the South and West of Ireland have no application to the North-East " ; " What in all Ireland's but a virtuous word, that in East Ulster is flat blasphemy."
What should make it particularly easy for Americans to persuade the Irish Nationalists—that is, the majority in the twenty-six counties—to apply to the six-county area the principles which they demand should be applied to them- selves; is the fact that America had to meet a similar problem in 1861 in the case of West Virginia; and met it successfully, thanks to the courage, the steadfastness, and the deep sense of justice which belonged to Mr. Lincoln. When Virginia wished to break away from the Union, the people of Western Virginia, who resembled the people of North-East Ulster in the fact that they were settlers or planters out of the Eastern States who had come into a corner of a Southern. State but were out of sympathy with the culture and- general political convictions of the rest of th. t State; claimed for a certain group of counties, which they declared formed a homogeneous area in which the will of the local majority should prevail, the right to remain in the Union. This demand on the part of the people of Western Virginia to be masters of their own fate was received by the rest of Virginia with a passionate scorn and indignation comparable to that with, which the Irish Nationalists treat the demand of the people of North-East Ulster. A propos of the situation, Mr. Lincoln at the very beginning of his Presidential career asked certain questions which we quoted the other day but which we must quote again :- ` In what, as a matter of principle, is the State better than the county. ? Would an exchange of names be an exchange of rights upon principle ? On what rightful principle may a State, being not more than one-fiftieth part of the nation in soil and population, break up the nation, and then coerce a -proportionally larger sub• division of itself in the most arbitrary way ? What mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State ? "
But Lincoln was not content to let the matter rest here. When, some two years later, the counties which now con- stitute Western Virginia introduced a Bill in Congress separ- ating themselves from. the rest of Virginia, and constituting themselves a separate State, Mr. Lincoln referred the problem of how to deal with the Bill to his Cabinet. Curiously enough, a certain number of them disapproved on legal and Constitutional grounds of the breaking up of a State area. Mr. Lincoln, however, remained true to the principles he had enunciated in 1861, and wrote a short memorandum on the subject (see Hay and Nicolay's Life of Lincoln, Vol. VI., chap. xiv.) which is a model of Constitutional wisdom. The essential portions of this memorandum are as follows " Can this Government stand, if it indulges constitutional con- structions by which men in open rebellion against it are to he accounted, man for man, the equals of those who maintain their loyalty to it ? Are they to be accounted even better citizens and more worthy of consideration, than those who merely neglect to vote ? If so, their treason against the Constitution enhances their constitutional value. . . . It is said, the devil takes care of- his own. Much more should a good spirit—the-spirit of the Consti- tution and the Union—tako care of its own. I think it cannot do less and live. . . . Doubtless those in remaining Virginia would return to the Union, so to speak, less reluctantly without the division of the old State than with it, but I think we could not save as much in this quarter by rejecting. the now State, as we should lose by it in West Virginia. We can scarcely dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle ; much less can we-afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field.- Her brave and good. men regard her admission into the Union as a matter of life and death. They have been true to the • Union under very severe grids. We have so acted as to justify their hopes, and we cannot fully retain their confidence, and co-operation, if we seem to break faith with them. . . . The division of a State is dreaded as a precedent.' But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call. it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution, and secession in favour of the Constitution.'
What is particularly notable about the memorandum is Lincoln's absolute refusal to desert those who had stood by the Union, as the people of Ulster have stood. by it here. The words we have italicized might be inscribed without a change of words by the people of North-East Ulster upoh their banner. We have one more word to say to the Americans of light and leading, who, we sincerely hope, will learn to understand Ulster's position, and to use their persuasive powers upon the Nationalists, getting them to reCognize with Cromwell that those who ask for liberty should be willing to give it. People often talk as if we had been ruling Ireland over since the Union as a conquered country. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place, Ireland has not merely had her fair share of representation in the Parliament at Westminster, but has had a far greater number of Members than her population gave her any right to have. Though London has roughly about the same population as Ireland, London has had not very much more than half the voting-power in the House which has belonged to Ireland. Again, Ireland has always been most generously treated in the matter of taxation. There are no taxes paid by men living in Ireland which are not paid by men living in England and Scotland. On the other hand, there are a number of taxes paid by inhabitants of England and Scotland which are not paid by inhabitants of Ireland, though those inhabitants of Ireland may be, and often are, quite as well off as, or better off than, their " matched" inhabitants 'n Great Britain. For example, the present writer, if he had had the fiscal good fortune to be domiciled in Ireland rather than England, would, before the war, have been paying some £30 a year less in taxation than what he actually paid because he lived in England. But if Ireland was the spoilt child of the United Kingdom before the war, she has certainly been even more so since the war. For instance, there has been no compulsory military service in Ireland, though this indulgence did not prevent a bloody rising of the Sinn Feiners. Very different was the American treatment of their Irish fellow-citizens in the matter of compulsory service. Mr. Lincoln absolutely refused the demand of the Irishmen not to be conscripted, and when the Irish rose in rebellion in the State of New York he dealt with them with the utmost severity. There was a good deal more blood shed in New York when the Irish had the apparent excuse of the application of conscription to them against their wishes than there was in Dublin, when we had in effect yielded to the plea of the Sinn Feiners that we had no right to make them fight in a quarrel in which their sym- pathies were with Casement and the Germans ! In truth, the Irish problem, as our American friends will find out if they study it fairly and in detail, and trust to their own judgments rather than to Nationalist rhetoric, is by no means as easy as it looks on the surface. If we could only be allowed to solve the problem on the principle of letting the will of the local majority prevail, we could solve it to- morrow with the best possible goodwill on the part of the Unionists. If it proves not soluble on these lines, it will not be our fault, but the fault of the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners. If the Americans can persuade them to be reasonable, and not to demand the heads of the people of North-East Ulster on a charger, they will have done us and the cause of the Allies an incomparable service, and we shall bless them all the days of our life. The task is well worth trying, and it is with no sense of irony, and without the slightest arriere pensee, that we invite our friends in America to approach the Ulster problem upon the lines upon which Mr. Lincoln approached and solved the problem of West Virginia—a solution, remember, which has lasted to this day. Who can doubt but that the people of the State of Virginia have been helped, not hindered, in their development by being deprived of the right to keep Western Virginia in subjection —i.e., by the preservation of the State of Virginia as a homo- geneous community instead of a house divided against itself ?
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