THE IRISH UNIONISTS AFTER HOME-RULE. T WO letters which we publish
in another column con- firm a belief which we know to be widely expressed in Ireland, that if we ever pass an Irish Home-rule Act, and betray, as the Irish Unionists will think it, our Irish allies to their foes, instead of remaining the advocates of an English policy in the Irish Parliaments of the future, they will turn round upon us and become our most strenuous and formidable foes. Of course, we all know that there is no bitterness like the bitterness of loyalty and love despised and rejected, and that would be the first and uppermost feeling in the minds of the Protestants and moderate Catholics of Ireland when they had at last convinced themselves that England had really turned her back upon them, and left them to fight out their battles with the Nationalists alone. But the forecast of which we speak is not founded on the mere anticipa- tion of a sudden rush of angry pride or wounded feeling. We may take for granted, if we please, that that would soon be past and exhausted. Ulstermen are a great deal too shrewd, and a great deal too canny, to injure deliberately their own prospects in order to revenge themselves on us for our desertion. Whatever they may now think that they will do, they will not risk inflicting what they believe to be a serious wound on their own interests, simply in order to make those who have deserted them, suffer for their desertion. Ulstermen would not be the strong race they are, if they were willing to subordinate their own highest interests in life to the craving for a moment of revengeful exultation. It would be a much more solid motive than this which would in- fluence the loyalists of Ulster and the other provinces in taking up an anti-English attitude, if they once felt clear that they had been definitely abandoned to their fate. They would then, no doubt, take careful stock of their political position, estimate shrewdly how they could best secure themselves a powerful influence over the policy of the new Irish Parliament and Ministry, and mould it in such a way as to make the Nationalist majority, not only disinclined, but afraid to quarrel with them, or to infringe their religious and moral rights.
How would they best be able to effect this purpose ? Cer- tainly not by getting the reputation of hanging back with reverted eyes to the old days of the English and Unionist policy. These would be gone for ever, and without leaving anything but soreness and the sense of ingratitude behind. There is no policy so hopeless and unpopular in any country as the policy which leans upon an external influence which is not only alien but menacing. Now, that is exactly what the English influence would be in an Irish Parliament committed to the experiment of Home-rule. What England could do would be pretty well limited to the work of undoing all that had been done, and restoring by force what she had by statute previously abolished. In the Irish Parliament and Administration itself, so long as they lasted, English influence would be excessively weak, and would have to take refuge in a negative attitude,—that is, in throwing cold water over every attempt to foster and encourage a new national life. Now, a policy of impotence as far as the present is concerned, of habitual self- depreciation, of political pococurantism and helplessness, never yet had a popular vogue in any assembly. It is of the very genius of a popular body to be hopeful, if not sanguine, to have confidence in itself, to hold out some bright prospect to those who elected it and started it on its course. You might as well expect a steam- engine to depreciate and disavow the significance of steam, as a popular assembly to depreciate and disavow the significance of popular choice. A Parliamentary party that professes from the first to proclaim the helpless- ness of the Parliament of which it is a part, to anticipate its speedy dissolution, and to predict the restoration of the power by which it had just been abandoned, would be merely still-born. No such party could even exist. The Ulstermen might stand aloof alto- gether and refuse to take part in the Irish Parliament, so long as they saw any chance that they could maintain that attitude ; but when once they had given up all pro- spect of aid from England, and had consented to sit in the Irish Parliament, they could not by any possibility manage to sustain an anti-patriotic attitude,—an attitude, too, of sympathy with a power which had deliberately abandoned them. That would be a sheer impossibility. Let them once come in to the Irish Parliament, and tliey must per- force find the means of appealing to Irish pride and Irish self-respect. And then the question would at once arise what that means should be. Of course, it must be in great measure dictated by the interests of the province which they represented. They would be obliged to resist anything like Roman Catholic dictation. They would be obliged to resist anything like oppressive commercial and financial legislation, any policy injurious to the Ulster manufacturers or the Ulster export and import trade. In order to resist either religious or commercial oppression with effect and success, they must find some subjects on which they could effectually appeal to the new Nationalist spirit, and, of course, they would find it at the expense of the Power which, in their belief, had abandoned and betrayed them. They would take the lead of the anti-English policy, so far as that policy did not tend to suffocate Irish trade and Irish manufactures.. They would not, and could not, adopt a policy of Protec- tion, because a policy of Protection would extinguish their trade, and throw themselves open at once to fatal retalia- tion; but, on any subject on which English pride was sensitive and tenacious, on any subject which involved the friendly relations of the two States, on any subject of national dignity, on any subject like the recruiting of the English Army or Navy, for instance, in Ireland, we should find the Ulstermen out-Herod Herod in their attacks on the people who had spurned their proffered loyalty and bid them go, when they had professed their earnest desire to stay. We do not deny, of course, that the sagacity of Ulstermen would be too great to keep them out of anything like renewed intrigues with France, or over- tures to the United States. Ulstermen would not be so. foolish as to ask again for a French expeditionary force, or to conspire with the Clan-na-Gael, so as to give England a new pretext for overrunning the country in a new civil war. There would be no popular folly of that kind in Ulster. But we should find no party in the Irish Parlia- ment so shrewd in placing obstacles in the way of Irish recruiting for the English service, no party so shrewd in making the work of the English Receiver-General of Irish. taxation difficult, no party so shrewd in finding grounds of protest against the demands made on the Irish people by the vendors of Irish land, as the Ulstermen. Here wouldi be the means of promoting an Irish patriotism that would not injure the local interests of Ulster, and here they would exercise their practical energy and tenacity to the, full by putting spokes in the wheel of English policy. The Ulstermen would have the spirit to go far enough, and the prudence not to go too far. They would avoid the ga.sconad- ing of the Southern Nationalists, and give Irish patriotism a bone and a muscle which would be essential for dealing with the suzerain power. We can imagine no party that would be more formidable to England in case of Irish Home-rule than the party led by such men as Colonel Saunderson or Mr. Macartney or Mr. Lea. These would be the men who would be animated by the sorest spirit of anti-English feeling, and who would yet have so much of the English solidity and practical sense that they would. command English respect and prevent Irish blundering,. We might cease to think of Ireland as a fruitful English recruiting-ground if we had once set the Ulstermen heart and soul against us, and we can imagine few more serious, blows to English power than such a result as that.
Previous page
