The Framework of Home Rule | Page 7

Erskine Childers
long period, although
styled a Kingdom, she was kept in a position of commercial and
political dependence inferior to that of any Colony. Constitutional
theory still blinds a number of people to the fact that in actual practice
Ireland is still governed in many respects as a Colony, but on principles
which in all other white communities of the British Empire are extinct.
Like all Colonies, she has a Governor or Lord-Lieutenant of her own,
an Executive of her own, and a complete system of separate
Government Departments, but her people, unlike the inhabitants of a
self-governing Colony, exercise no control over the administration. She
possesses no Legislature of her own, although in theory she is supposed
to possess sufficient legislative control over Irish affairs through
representation in the Imperial Parliament. In practice, however, this
control has always been, and still remains, illusory, just as it would
certainly have proved illusory if conferred upon any Colony. It can be
exercised only by cumbrous, circuitous, and often profoundly
unhealthy methods; and over a wide range of matters it cannot by any
method whatsoever be exercised at all.

To look behind mere technicalities to the spirit of government, Ireland
resembles one of that class of Crown Colonies of which Jamaica and
Malta are examples, where the inhabitants exercise no control over
administration, and only partial control over legislation.[4]
Why is this?
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his political
judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when opposing the first
reading of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. "Does
anybody doubt," he said, "that if Ireland were a thousand miles away
from England she would not have been long before this a
self-governing Colony?" Now this was not a barren geographical
truism, which might by way of hypothesis be applied in identical terms
to any fraction of the United Kingdom--say, for example, to that part of
England lying south of the Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made any
attempt to deny--no one with the smallest knowledge of history could
have denied--that Ireland, though only sixty miles away from England,
was less like England than any of the self-governing Colonies then
attached to the Crown, possessing distinct national characteristics
which entitled her, in theory at any rate, to demand, not merely colonial,
but national autonomy. On the contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of
his way to argue, with all the force and fire of an accomplished debater,
that the Bill was a highly dangerous measure precisely because, while
granting Ireland a measure of autonomy, it denied her some of the
elementary powers, not only of colonial, but of national States; for
instance, the full control over taxation, which all self-governing
Colonies possessed, and the control over foreign policy, which is a
national attribute. The complementary step in his argument was that,
although nominally withheld by statute, these fuller powers would be
forcibly usurped by the future Irish Government through the leverage
offered by a subordinate Legislature and Executive, and that, once
grasped, they would be used to the injury of Great Britain and the
minority in Ireland. Ireland ("a fearful danger") might arm, ally herself
with France, and, while submitting the Protestant minority to cruel
persecution, would retain enough national unity to smite Britain hip
and thigh, and so avenge the wrong of ages.
Even to the most ardent Unionist the case thus presented must, in the
year 1911, present a doubtful aspect. The British entente with France,

and the absence of the smallest ascertainable sympathy between Ireland
and Germany, he will dismiss, perhaps, as points of minor importance,
but he will detect at once in the argument an antagonism, natural
enough in 1893, between national and colonial attributes, and he will
remember, with inner misgivings, that his own party has taken an
especially active part during the last ten years in furthering the claim of
the self-governing Colonies to the status of nationhood as an essential
step in the furtherance of Imperial unity. The word "nation," therefore,
as applied to Ireland, has lost some of its virtue as a deterrent to Home
Rule. Even the word "Colony" is becoming harmless; for every year
that has passed since 1893 has made it more abundantly clear that
colonial freedom means colonial friendship; and, after all, friendship is
more important than legal ties. In one remarkable case, that of the
conquered Dutch Republic in South Africa, a flood of searching light
has been thrown on the significance of those phrases "nation" and
"Colony." There, as in Ireland, and originally in Canada, "national"
included racial characteristics, and colonial autonomy signified national
autonomy in a more accurate sense than in Australia or Newfoundland.
But we know now that it does not signify either a racial tyranny within
those nations, or a racial antipathy to the Mother
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