Against Home Rule | Page 5

1782 would be repeated. Resistance to Ireland's demands for extended powers would bring about war between the two countries. In the striking phrase of Mr. Balfour's arresting article, "The battle of the two Parliaments would become the battle of the two peoples." It is only necessary to refer briefly to the fact that the active section of the Nationalist party has continually and consistently opposed recruiting for the British Army. It is perfectly certain that, under Home Rule, this policy would be accentuated rather than reversed. We now draw recruits from Ireland out of all proportion to its population. Under Home Rule, the difficulties of maintaining a proper standard of men and efficiency must be immensely increased.
If there were no other arguments against Home Rule, the paramount necessities of Imperial defence would demand the maintenance of the Union. But the opposition to the proposed revolution in Ireland is based not only on the considerations of Imperial safety, but also on those of national honour. The historical bases of Irish nationalism have been destroyed by the arguments summarised in this book by Mr. Fisher and Mr. Amery. It was the existence of a separate Parliament in Dublin that made Ireland, for so many centuries, alike a menace to English liberty and the victim of English reprisals. Miss A.E. Murray has pointed out[1] that experience seemed to show to British statesmen that Irish prosperity was dangerous to English liberty. It was the absence of direct authority over Ireland which made England so nervously anxious to restrict Irish resources in every direction in which they might, even indirectly, interfere with the growth of English power. Irish industries were penalised and crippled, not from any innate perversity on the part of English statesmen, or from any deliberate desire to ruin Ireland, but as a natural consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic policy of the age. The very poverty of Ireland, as expressed in the lowness of Irish wages, was a convenient and perfectly justifiable argument for exclusion. Mr. Amery shows that the Protestant settlers of Ulster were penalised even more severely than the intriguing Irish chieftains against whom they were primarily directed.
It was the consciousness of the natural result of separation that caused the Irish Parliament, upon two separate occasions, to petition for that union with England which was delayed for over a century. The action of Grattan and his supporters in wresting the impossible Constitution of 1782, from the harassed and desperate English Government, began that fatal policy of substituting political agitation for economic reform which has ever since marred the Irish Nationalist movement. John Fitzgibbon[2] pointed out in the Irish House of Commons that only two alternatives lay before his country--Separation or Union. Under Separation an Irish Parliament might be able to pursue an economic policy of its own; under Union the common economic policy of the two countries might be adjusted to the peculiar interests of each.
Pitt, undoubtedly, looked forward to a Customs Union with internal free trade as the ultimate solution of the difficulty, but a Customs Union was impossible without the fullest kind of legislative unity. It is true that the closing years of the eighteenth century were years of prosperity to certain classes and districts in Ireland, but Mr. Fisher has shown beyond dispute that this prosperity neither commenced with Grattan's Parliament nor ended with its fall. It was based upon the peculiar economic conditions which years of war and preparations for war had fostered in England; it was bound in any case to disappear with the growing concentration of industrial interests which followed the general introduction of machinery. The immediate result of the passing of the Act of Union was to increase the Irish population and Irish trade.
But to a certain extent that prosperity was fictitious and doomed to failure so soon as peace and the introduction of scientific methods of industry had caused the concentration of the great manufactures. Then came the great economic disaster for Ireland--the adoption of free trade by England. The Irish famine of 1849 was not more severe than others that had preceded it, but its evil effects were accentuated by the policy of the English Government. The economists decided that the State ought to do nothing to interfere with private enterprise in feeding the starving people, and as there was no private enterprise in the country, where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were left to die of hunger by the roadside. The lands the potato blight spared were desolated by the adoption of free trade. The exploitation of the virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands of Ireland from tillage into grass. A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil. The landlords and the farmers of Ireland were divided