IRELAND AND HOME RULE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—Our community is to-day somewhat equally divided between those who fear we are about to have Home Rule and those who fear we are not. From the standpoint of the latter perhaps you will allow me to ask the consideration of your readers. You recall the ill-fated Irish Councils Bill; how acceptable that measure was to Mr. Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and how when it was offered to a Dublin Convention it was just flung out into the gutter. Now again Mr. Redmond has wandered into that fools' paradise; he has asked in a score of letters and speeches for a sub- ordinate legislature in which none of the Imperial parapher- nalia such as land and tariff taxation is to be exercised. Of course, the Government will offer him every facility, because with the land taxes of the Budget of 1909 just beginning to fester there is not the remotest chance that Ireland will accept any such relation as that to Westminster. So that again an Irish Convention will meet to discover that once more Ireland has been tricked, and that this time the confidence trick in land and increment and stamp and succession taxes and in the cessation of all landpurchase has cost her a king's ransom. In the case of the land purchase instalments, estimating for three demises and three successions in the sixty-nine years, the new taxes add more than five years' purchase to the price (twenty-two years' purchase) at which the writer sold to his tenants. Here is fully thirty million pounds lost to the old and to the new landlord under this one head. Thirty millions! a sum in excess of ten per cent. of all Ireland's assets. " Well you will say, " the Liberal Government has tricked Redmond, and considering the way he played his cards it serves him right." But that is, unfortunately, not the way Ireland will look at it; she says : " We have once again been sold by England; before the ink has well dried upon our signatures to purchase, the price in her Parliament across the sea has been raised twenty per cent. We are swindled, and it is the House of Commons which has done it. And this time we are hopeless ; our leaders had agreed that the proposed Dublin parliament should be subordinate in all essentials to the Parliament at Westminster, and, lo ! we wake up to find that Parliament is the Budgeteers' own and only House, the very funs et origo mall."
Here, then, is the great stone of Sisyphus once more at the very bottom of the hill, and all the elements of passion and bitterness are about to bubble and seethe in the witches' cauldron. The Irish Party has again been betrayed by an English Government. Mr. Redmond has done all Mr. Asquith's dirty work and loaded Ireland with fresh burdens, and for what? In order that English Radicals should experiment with finance and the Constitution. There never was anything more misleading and more mischievous than the declarations of the Tory Press that it is Mr. Asquith who has done Mr. Redmond's dirty work. Mr. Asquith has done after his kind. Mr. Redmond has been his supple instrument. It is Mr. Asquith, receiving everything, giving nothing, who has loaded Ireland with fresh burdens, and has rendered Home Rule impossible for a generation to come.
This note, Sir, is a protest only—I have no suggestion to make. We Home Rulers are undone. Thrust a pen into John Dillon's band and tell him to write that Home Rule Bill which seems good to him, subject only to England's unfettered prerogative to tax Ireland's land and manipulate Ireland's tariff, and Mr. Dillon will, after disavowing all responsibility for the impasse, admit the impossibility. It was difficult while the "House of Landlords" enjoyed the veto power and might have protected Ireland's new proprietary body against socialistic taxation, but with the Lords gone the game is AD.
Look in at the House of Commons ; look at those good, un- lettered fellows on the Irish benches, and then look at that muster of smart lawyers drawing their £5,000 a year on the Government Bench. I do not envy the man who watches without sympathy a conflict so hopelessly onesided, but at least it is not Ireland, it is the British Government, which is responsible for breakers ahead.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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