DR. HORTON, EDMUND BURKE, AND IRELAND.
r To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—The extract from Burke in Dr. Horton's second letter to the Tintea is somewhat misleading in the absence of the
context. Burke, of course, defended the Irish Parliament as he defended all well-established constitutional forms until good and sufficient reason was shown for their abandonment.
But his argument in the speech referred to (Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22nd, 1775) is throughout a defence, not of separate Parliaments, but of representation, whether in a separate or in a united Parliament. He discusses in turn four instances of the cure of the ills of the body politics by representative institutions—Ireland, Wales, Chester, and Durham. The first had a separate Parliament ; the other three secured representation in a united Parliament; and, as events proved, Burke was wrong in his deductions regarding the suc- cess of the separate Parliament and right in the case of the United Parliament. Wales, like the Counties Palatine of Chester and Durham, was merged in the Westminster Parliament, and, as Burke says, "from that moment, as by a charm, the tumults subsided, obedience was restored : peace, and order, and civilization followed in the wake of liberty." Dr. Horton finds political wisdom "graven in letters of light in the speeches of Burke." Does he find an argument for a separate Parliament in Burke's eulogium of the peace, order, and civilization that followed the representation of Wales in the English Parliament P
That Burke was wrong in regarding Ireland, under her separate Parliament, as a "strength and ornament" to the Empire became sufficiently obvious before his death ; indeed, his later letters to Irish friends are little more than one long wail over the hopeless condition into which Ireland was drifting, thanks to the reckless incompetence of those whom Lord Morley in his biography of Burke (e. 190) has called "her fatuous chiefs and their too worthy followers" in the pursuit of "the phantom of Irish legislative independence." The Conciliation speech was delivered in 1775. Before many years the Volunteers had grown .into a menace alike to the Irish Parliament and to the Imperial connexion. The "separate but not independent" Constitution which Burke had admired had under Grattan declared its independence; the United Irishmen in their turn conspired and rebelled against Grattan's Parliament, and the curtain fell, within a year of Burke's death, on a scene of revolution, bloodshed, and chaos. The opposition in Ireland, wrote Burke shortly before his death, was "running the whole course of Jacobinism." The United Irishmen wanted separation, but, said Burke, "by such a separation Ireland would be the most completely undone country in the world ; the most distracted and, in the end, the most desolate part of
the habitable globe." And the wit of man has not yet devised a habitable half-way house between separation and union.
As regards the indefeasible rights of the Irish "nation,"
Dr. Horton would be well-advised to turn to the series Of special articles that have been appearing in the Times, articles
characterized by a thoroughness of knowledge and a clarity of thought that leave nothing to be desired. The writer makes clear the fundamental fact that there are in Ireland two well-defined nations, and that the new supremacy of the
majority over the minority now advocated by Dr. Horton and his friends would be fraught with as much injustice and mis-
government as was the old supremacy of the minority over the majority, now happily abolished. On that point the Ulster colony may be tempted to retort on Dr. Horton with another citation from the same speech, "graven in letters of light." "We cannot," said Burke, "falsify the pedigree of this fierce - people and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition. Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery."—I am, Sir, Ste.,
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