FANCY-STATESMANSHIP FOR IRELAND.
i IT is not to be wondered at,—indeed, it is great reason for satisfaction,—that everybody who has any political thoughts or convictions at all should now be trying to turn them to account for the benefit of Ireland. The efforts of individual ingenuity may in themselves be chiefly calculated, as Mr. Disraeli once said of the apologies put forth for the Minority• principle, " to subserve private complacency ; " but even mere air-bubbles rising from the great fermenting chaos of genuine anxieties felt on the score of Ireland in all depart- ments of the United Kingdom will have this advantage,—to show our statesmen that they must make a serious effort to be before pUblic opinion in this matter, to be prepared with a con- structive policy for which they can advance weighty reasons,— and those, reasons likely to convince a deeply stirred and much exercised, if not exactly matured, public thought.. Still, many of the suggestions advanced by private thinkers certainly do seem to us more like the paralytic man's helpless effort to use his muscles under stringent feeling of necessity, than the success- ful use thereof. Thus, one writer who makes a great show in a daily contemporary ends an elaborate letter on the difficulty of doing anything of any practical importance, except abolish- ing the Protestant Establishment, with reproaches to the Queen for not visiting Ireland. Those reproaches may be justly due. No doubt the late Prince Consort's prejudice against what he held to be the English Poland is the one set- off to his many vast services to this reign. But the time is utterly past for this set of considerations. A Corsican might as well propose, after a series of private slights which had ended in a deadly vendetta, to heal the feud by asking his foe's wife to dinner, on the ground that this omission was the beginning of sorrows. Very small remedial measures, or rather precau- tions, applied early, may be, and often are, of infinitely greater value than rather large remedial measures applied late. Still, to lament that you did not hold your horse up well after you have been thrown and broken your leg, and to propose to do so in future, is rather unpracticaL The, time has come then for following the rules of the physician, and not for brooding over the precautions of the ridingmaster. So, again, Mr. Goldwin Smith's proposal, at the end of a very able, but we think very prejudiced letter to the Daily News of Monday, to summon a special session of Parliament to meet in Dublin, to debate on what shall be done with the revenues of the Irish Church, seems to us, we must say, like suggesting goldbeater's skin for a gangrene. We are aware that Mr. G. Smith suggests it not so much as a salve to the Irish vanity, as by, way of beating into the dull heads of English legislators what Ireland and the Irish are really like. But we must say we believe that the temporary presence of, say three or four hundred dill .Englishmen in Dublin, would be entirely inoperative to improve their receptive imagination for things Irish. They would remark that the houses were very like English houses, except the mud cabins, which they would attri- bute to the bad political economy of Irishmen, and they would be more persuaded than ever that Ireland wanted im- proving by more complete assimilation to. Englaud. What history, and reiterated risings in our own generation, and -" independent " Irish Members have failed, to teach them, we should look in vain to a single Irish Session to effect. Moreover, it must be said on the other side, that the spectacle of a British Parliament meeting in Dublin would probably be far more irritating than soothing to Irish patriotism. Nothing would realize more vexatiously to the Irish,—and, that they should understand this is perhaps desirable, but that they should have it painfully flaunted before their sensitive perceptions is certainly not so,—how very little power they would have to influence, in any national sense, the affairs of their own country, than the spectacle of their own Members in a mino- rity of at least 550 on every question on which the wishes of the sister kingdoms could be supposed to be divided at all accord- ing to race. If you want to give an artificial stimulus to the desire for a separate national existence, it seems to us that you could not do better than to mock the Irish with a Parlia- ment assembled in Dublin, in which Irish questions would be debated and decided by Englishmen openly acting under English prepossessions, and displaying at every turn their total inability, and perhaps also their little care, to enter into the niceties of Irish feeling. To conciliate the Irish by a dis- play of force such as pertains to a political army of occupation, —and such a British Parliament in Dublin. would be,—would indeed be difficult. We had clearly better take care how we suggest what would be, to the Irish, painfully vivid contrasts between a national Parliament, and one that is by no means national, on College Green.
Amidst this chaos of somewhat helpless suggestions, two or three principles seem to us to come out tolerably clear, and to be worth energetic restatement. First, we ought clearly to do all for Ireland that we have done for ourselves and for Scotland in the way of concession to popular feeling. It is too childish even to discuss the question how England would have been disposed to tolerate an established Roman Catho- licism,—we do not mean in her present religious condition, but even in the reign of Charles I., when there were a vast many more Roman Catholics in England than now, and pro- bably quite as many in proportion as there are at present of Protestants in Ireland. It is equally childish to ask how far was Scotland disposed to see any Church but her popular Presbyterian Church supported by the power of the British Union. How can England be justified in forcing on Ireland what she would never have permitted any power to force on herself, and would not have attempted to force on Scotland ? It is idle to talk of the absence of any practical grievance in the matter, and of the little significance attached by the Fenians to the Irish Church question. This may be all true. But it is not a little significance which attaches to the sense of being under the dominion of strangers and aliens, and it is as a signal of this dominion, as constantly recalling it to the memory, that the Protestant Establishment in Ireland is so bad. But next, even when we have done all that we must honestly admit that we should do even with a high hand in our own case, if placed under circumstances similar to those of the Irish, we quite agree with Mr. Goldwin Smith that we have done but little. The real object is, as he says, to satisfy a moral want. There is no people to which patriotism means more,—few, perhaps, to whom it means so much, as the Irish, and they cannot feel patriotism to the present British rule. It does not suit their taste, or appeal to their sympathies. The Irish, they feel, are a mere cypher in the United Kingdom. We are doing our best to assimilate them, to make decent Englishmen of them, and they wish to be, before all tjiings, themselves. There seems but two courses open to remedy this,—short of giving Ireland her independence ; to give her half the loaf she asks for,—that is, as Mr. Goldwin Smith says, decentraliza- tion ; in short, a State-municipality of which she may be proud, if she can ;—or, clinging steadily to the idea of perfect and indissoluble political union, to attempt a social revolution which would identify the mass of Irishmen so closely with the prosperity of the country and the political status quo, that they would be metamorphosed from 'Reds ' into Conservatives in a single generation. Now, the former, which is Mr. Goldwin Smith's proposal, seems to us to be open to the objection both of dangerousness and insufficiency. It may be, as we said of the more trivial expedient of exhibiting the Queen more lavishly to her Irish subjects, that had we adopted the State or local decentralizing system earlier with respect to Ireland, the general disaffection would never have grown up. But we are sure that, now when it has grown up, to offer the Irish Nationalists a dividend of a shilling in the pound on their demands, would be only to whet their appetites and re- double their efforts. To decentralize experimentally the Government of a thoroughly disaffected country, where cen- tralization was certainly not the cause of disaffection, and where it Is a mere visionary hope that decentralization may tend to remove it, is a most perilous policy. Decentralization means putting a vast deal of additional power into the hands of the local population, but implies also withholding exactly that kind of power for which the masses ask. Now, what is likely to be the result of telling the Irish patriots that they shall have an influence as exclusive in all small Irish affairs as they like, but that in those larger Irish affairs which are identified with patriotic feelings they shall have no further influence at all ? Is it not certain that this offer, instead of satisfying their demands, will only encourage them to urge those demands more persistently, and to use their new organization to foster the spirit of those demands in every county and borough where they have any chance ? Another objection to Mr. Goldwin Smith's proposal for decentralization is that, as extending only to municipal affairs, it is but ill- adapted either to the genius or the special circumstances of the Irish people. What they rather prefer and probably need, is a more scientific centralization, a less English and more French style of government,—at least in the administration of justice. Our English local justice of the peace' system is an item of decentralized policy which works very badly in Ireland, and is probably one of the chief stimuluses of Irish irritation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's idea of giving patriots half what they ask, is really not only perilous but, if followed, might be a new ground of Irish rage. It is a case in which half a loaf might very likely prove much worse than no bread.
We are driven back, then, if we would not stimulate demands which no one ever dreams of satisfying,—which could not be satisfied short of repeal of the Union,—to abandon that line of concession altogether, and try the effect of a social revolu- tion such as might make the Irish masses true Conservatives,— too sensible of their stake in the country and too proud of their position to wish to see any dangerous political experi- ments tried for the future. Now, we say boldly that the only possible revolution of the kind is one which should identify the Irish people with the Irish soil, and that the only means of which we are aware capable of effecting it; is the means by which Bengal was turned from one of the most miser- able and disloyal into the most contented of British provinces in India. The proposals which Mr. Bright, and a very thought- ful student of the Prussian and Irish land questions, discuss in another column, seem to us to tend in the right direction, but to be not bold enough and not rapid enough in their operation for what is really needed,—to do something that would render Ireland completely loyal in another generation,—which might put Fenianism out of the question within ten years. This could be effected by what was called in Bengal a "permanent settlement,"—the transformation of peasant cottiers and tenant- farmers into actual owners paying a quit-rent, and liable to eviction only if they ceased to pay it punctually,—and as far as we know by that alone. Of course no one would propose it without full compensation to the landlord for the sacrifice of the estimated future increase in the value of his estate. And even under this condition we know well that it will be and is called confiscation. Confiscation is a very nasty word, but so is rebellion. A wide-spread spirit of agrarian outrage and political disaffection are not to be cured by petty measures. We do not propose such a measure,—we never proposed it,—as an economical reform. We have very little doubt that the small owners miglit obtain far less net returns, and possibly even no better gross returns, than the present owners. A peasant proprietary has plenty of difficulties and evils of its own. Subdivision of tenures would, doubtless, multiply to a dangerous extent, and, in spite of the "magic of property," the poverty of the country might be as great as at present. Still, all analogy shows that the political disloyalty—the greatest evil that can exist—would disappear. Irish peasant proprietors would actively oppose revolution if they knew that revolution meant danger to the landed property of themselves and their kin all over the country. If you want a real, radi- cal remedy for the disloyalty which has grown with the pros- perity of Ireland, and which has strengthened with the justice and lenity of our administrative policy,—here it is. The only other efficient and logical policy that we know of is to dissolve the Union, and give Ireland back her old, and-even more than her old, independence. No Englishman in his senses will pro- pose that.
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