TOPICS OF THE DAY.
COLONIAL HOME RULE.
THE Government's Irish scheme is Colonial Home Rule, or at any rate it is to bear that label. That is the only deduction which it is possible to make from the speech in which Mr. Birrell on October 19th outlined the Ministerial measure. It is also clear from Mr. Birrell's speech that the Parliament to be set up in Ireland is not to be a Parliament like the provincial Parliaments in Canada, but a Parliament of the type which exists in New Zealand or Newfoundland. If Mr. Birrell had meant to convey the impression that all that was to be given to Ireland was some form of glorified local government, he would not have laid such stress upon the national character of the Legislature intended for Ireland. Again, he spoke of the Irish Parliament being subordinate to the Imperial Parliament. The provincial legislatures of Canada are in no sense subordinate to the Imperial Parliament. It has, indeed, no direct cognizance of them at all. All that the Imperial Parliament is concerned with is the Dominion Parliament. Here, though in reality, of course, the Dominion Parliament is in no true sense subordinate, there is a. theoretical subordination. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, if it were determined to produce the disruption of the Empire, might legislate for Canada over the heads of the Dominion Parliament. Again, Parliament, since it wields the veto powers of the Crown, might in effect veto Canadian domestic legislation. But no one has ever suggested that our Parliament could, even in theory, exercise authority over the Province of Quebec or keep that local Parliament in subordination. When Mr. Birrell talked of there already being plenty of sub- ordinate Parliaments he could only have meant, as we have said, Colonial Home Rule. Therefore his description of a Parliament with two Houses and a Cabinet responsible to those two Houses, empowered to deal with purely Irish concerns and with a wide and generous definition of Irish concerns, shows us that the Government intend to work for all it is worth the precedent under which representative institutions were granted to the Colonies, and a, real though not a nominal autonomy established—the precedent which Mr. Gladstone always favoured.
We can, we believe, show that this decision to adopt Colonial Home Rule is a chimera, and has, in the circum- stances, no real meaning. For the moment, however, we will admit that Colonial Home Rule holds the field, and consider the arguments that can be adduced in its favour. We are told that Colonial Home Rule is the founda- tion stone of the true Imperialism. Without it the Empire would have been ruined. By its grant we have turned disaffected provinces into loyal daughter nations. That, as a statement of fact, is no doubt perfectly true. We absolutely deny, however, that there is any analogy between the cases of Ireland and the Colonies. Ireland is not a colony, but a portion of the United Kingdom and so a portion of an existing Parliamentary unit. To be able to use the analogy in question we must assume a very different set of circumstances from that which governs the relations between Ireland and Great Britain. A true analogy would be the endowment of the North Island of New Zealand with a separate Parliament, while the South Island retained a theoretic supremacy; or the splitting up of Queensland into two provinces, one province being labelled subordinate. Because we found that legislative autonomy was the best way of governing portions of the Empire sepa- rated by thousands of miles of ocean, and inhabited by a population which was practically unanimous in its desire for a Parliament of its own, it by no means follows that the same policy would be a success when applied to a portion of the United Kingdom which has been incorporated with Great Britain for over a hundred years, which is physically part of the British archipelago, and in which a third of the population is bitterly hostile to the scheme for dissolving the legislative union.
Let us assume, however, for a moment that the Govern- ment arguments in favour of dissolving the Union and establishing Colonial Home Rule in its place are based on a sound analogy, and that we may expect the good results to flow from it which flowed from the establishment of Colonial Parliamentary independence. In the first place it is obvious that this is a case in which, if the scheme is to prove hopeful, the example must be truly followed and not merely imitated in name though not in fact. What made the establishment of the Colonial Parliaments a success was the circumstance that self-government was granted with no niggardly hand. To begin with—and this is the most important point of all—there was a complete disentanglement of finance. When we established Colonial Parliaments we gave them absolute freedom of taxation —even the power to tax the goods of the Mother Country and to treat her in this respect as if she were a foreign nation. Here we at once cut away the greatest of all sources of friction. Are we prepared to do this in the case of Ireland ? Are we prepared, that is, to put her Parliament financially in the position of the Parliament of the Dominion of New Zealand ? If we are, then two things must follow. Ireland, while exer- cising full legislative powers over all Irish domestic affairs, must also pay her own way and raise the money required for her own governance. In the last resort the reason why we do not and cannot interfere with the domestic concerns of New Zealand is the fact that the New Zealanders do not ask that a penny of our money shall be spent in the areas governed by their Parliaments. We do not tax them and they do not tax us. We do not subsidize their ex- chequers and they do not contribute to ours. Are the Government prepared while cutting the legislative painter also to cut the financial painter ? If they are, we admit, granted that no attention is to be paid to the voice of that large minority in Ireland which detests Home Rule, that a case can be made out for Colonial Home Rule.
Let us now look a little more closely into what this means. It means, on the one hand, that Ireland would be required to pay no contribution to the National Debt, although a great deal of that debt was incurred during the existence of the in- corporating Union, and for Irish as well as for English and Scotch purposes. Next, it means that Ireland for the future is freed from any direct contribution to national and Imperial defence, whether as regards the Army or the Navy. Finally, it must mean that Ireland would have to provide out of her own taxation for every Irish need, that she must pay for her own old-age pensions, that she must take over the land purchase scheme, that she must provide entirely out of her own resources for her own education and for all her other social requirements. Are the people of England and Scotland prepared, on the one hand, to let Ireland off her share of responsibility for the national debt and also to let her off all contributions to the Imperial expenditure in the future ? On the other hand, are the Irish people prepared to forgo any and every of those contributions which hitherto have been, and as we think rightly, made to Ireland as a poor part of the United Kingdom by the richer sections of the nation ? We do not believe that it will be found that either side is willing to do this or that the Government are even pre- pared to suggest it. Here are the reasons for our belief. In the first place we are told that Irish Home Rule is to be a model for Scotch and Welsh Home Rule. If that is so, even if the Customs difficulty can be got over by a Zollverein, such as that which prevails in the Federal Empire of Germany, we shall arrive at an arrangement under which the whole burden of the National Debt will fall upon England. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales will each have slipped the collar, and the State coach will be drawn solely by the English taxpayer. We can hear our Radical readers saying : "All that you are doing now is to adopt the stale device of a reductio ad absurdum. Of course the Government proposals will not be of this mad kind. No one proposes that Ireland shall make no contribution to the National Debt or to National Defence, or, again, that England and Scotland shall give up helping Ireland as their poorer partner." No doubt this is in a sense true. The Government, of course, will never venture to make a clear proposal of this kind, recognizing, as they are bound to do, that the case is not fit for such treatment. But if that is so, then it is clear that their analogy is worthless, and that it is absurd to argue that because the establishment of true Colonial self-government has been a success there- fore the establishment of something utterly different, though it has the same label stuck upon it, must prove a success. The Government scheme, if it is not real Colonial Home Rule, cannot be recommended as Mx. Birrell tries to recommend it by the argument, " See what results you achieved in the Colonies by granting legislative autonomy." As well might a doctor say, " I cured Jones by a mixture out of a bottle with this label. I am now going to put a totally different mixture into that bottle in order to cure Smith. Since, however, the label is the same the results on the patient will also be the same ! " We have reserved to the last a matter in which the Government proposal differs absolutely and fundamentally from that applied to the Colonies. According to the Government scheme Irish members are to remain at Westminster in the full numbers to which Ireland's population entitles her. This alone knocks the Colonial analogy completely on the head. When the South African Union was established we did not enact that thirty or forty South African members were to come to Westminster and to vote on all the domestic affairs of the United King- dom. Once again we can hear the voice of a supporter of the present Government declaring that we are confusing the issue, and that the Irish Parliament will be like a Canadian Provincial Parliament. The Province of Quebec has its own Parliament, but it also sends representatives to the Dominion Parliament at Ottawa. No doubt it does, but the analogy here is vitiated by the fact that the Irish members are not to be sent to a new Federal and Imperial Parliament concerned only with Federal affairs, but are to be sent to the domestic legislature of Great Britain. If the example of the Canadian Provincial Governments is to be of any help to the Government, they must be prepared to set up a Federal Parliament and subordinate Parliaments not only in Ireland but in Scotland, in Wales, in Northum- bria, in Strathclyde, in Mercia, in Wessex, and in East Anglia. In truth none of the analogies from what we have done in the past in regard to Colonial self-government is of the slightest value. The case of Ireland is absolutely different. If the policy of Irish Home Rule and the break- up of the existing legislative union is to be defended it must be defended entirely on its own merits. To say that because we brought happiness to Canada, contentment to Australia and New Zealand, and peace to South Africa by the establishment of legislative autonomy we can do the same in Ireland is the falsest of all the false analogies ever coined by the wit of man.
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