IRELAND AND REDISTRIBUTION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The one thing needful to re-awaken the latent animosity of Ireland for England is the project of my friend Captain Morrison Bell, which you acclaim. The Wyndham land purchases have worked magically for improved relations, but the truly cynical proposal which Mr. Boner Law seems to favour, that we shall tear in two an all-important condition of the Act of Union, would unite Ireland as nothing else, and make British Government in Ireland far more impossible than in the "Bloody-eighties." When was it discovered that representation was to be by rule of thumb—by counting noses ? At the Union Ireland had more than one-third the total population of these islands; of 658 members she, on the basis of population, should have had 220; the Act gave her 100. In 1832, when by agreement there was an increase in the personnel of the House, Ireland had a population of 7,767,000 out of 24,000,000— say one-third, and we allotted her one-sixth. Then the agrarian province being under-represented to the point of impotence, the predominant partner embarked on that great fiscal experiment so dear to the Spectator. According to the Report of the Childers Commission, there were in 1841 80,000 hands employed in Ireland's cloth mills; in 1901 there were 5,300. In 1841 there were 135,000 in her linen mills; in 1901, 77,400. As to rural Ireland—a country more rural than any in Europe save Russia—the exodus of her agrarians because of Free Trade has been a little, but not much, more spectacular and deplorable than the rural depopula- tion of my native county, Sussex. Having thus removed Troy into Italy—for there are fourteen millions of Irish now in North America—your proposition is to make of every one of these a rancorous enemy of Great Britain by treating the Act of Union as waste paper without the consent of the signatories to that treaty.
Do you not see that it is impossible to deal in this way with Latins ? With Saxons it might be possible. The teterrima eausa of trouble is that we English forget that the Irish are, just as the Italians are, a race who, if wronged, brood over their wrongs and handle knives ; and, quite apart from the question of national perfidy, we shall never do this thing, because if we did the life of the wearer of the crown, within his circle of guards, would not be safe against the blade of the assassin.
The writer is by domicile one of those Munster Protestants as to whose security, in the event of a Dublin Parliament, we are the recipient of so much, as I think, unneeded warning and sympathy. But I affirm most emphatically that if the Tories gerrymander the Act of Union we shall have to emigrate en masse; that we in Ireland have far more to fear from Captain Bell, in anarchy and unrest, than we have from Mr. Redmond and the puppet "Parliament " provided in this silly Bill.—I
[Mr. Frewen appears to hold that the Unionist Party can be prevented doing electoral justice to England by threats. We think that he will prove mistaken. We would do no injustice whatever to Ireland, but if the Church of Ireland could admittedly be disestablished, in spite of the Act of Union, the Irish over-representation can be reduced.—ED. Spectator.]
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