What is the fact of Irish history vital to our present cause? Surely it is this, that up to the year 1800 the year of the Act of Union Ireland had possessed for practically five centuries a Home Rule Government in some shape or form. In other words, self-government had been the rule and not the exception throughout the centuries preceding 1800. This is a complete and sufficient answer to those who argue that the supporters of Irish Home Rule are making a proposal of a completely novel and revolutionary kind, without precedent in the history of the Western world.

As a matter of plain fact, it was the framers of the Act of Union who were the revolutionaries, and it is the supporters of Home Rule who are returning to the ancient paths. The Home Rulers have five centuries behind them, as against the one century behind the Unionists. From the days of Simon de Montfort the Irish Parliament developed side by side with the English, growing with the growth of English rule in Ireland, and varying with its limitations. Its powers, indeed, were placed under a grave and serious limitation by Poynings’ Law, passed in the reign of Henry VII., and strengthened in the reign of Mary Tudor. They were for a brief time entirely taken away by Oliver Cromwell, who was, strangely enough, the first great Unionist ruler of Ireland. Restored by Charles II., the Irish Parliament was again limited in power by the Government of George I. But in 1782 it broke through all these limitations, and became for a short brilliant period a fully self-governing Parliament.

We have thus the illuminating fact that, with one single exception and that an example eminent in English affairs, but certainly not to be followed in Irish every great English ruler and monarch governed Ireland under a distinct Irish Home Rule Parliament up to the year 1800. If Home Rule is so certain to be ruinous to Empire, how, we may well ask, did these rulers build up the British Empire? How did Marlborough and Clive, Chatham and Walpole, do their great world-work with an Irish Parliament behind them? The answer is, of course, that they did it better, and not worse, because Ireland was so far satisfied with her fortunes as to be willing to put her full force into the struggle for Empire.

For as long as Ireland possessed a Parliament she always possessed hope.

THE UNION CENTURY

As against these five centuries, we have one century of Irish rule under a united Parliament 1800 to 1911. One against five. But as the one is more recent, we have here not a bad provision of material for an answer to the question: “Which has proved in the past the best way of governing Ireland Union or Home Rule?”

In regard to the century of Union, the record lies before us, open and palpable, a tale of disaster and tragedy almost without parallel in the modern history of the world. We see in the statistics of Irish population, of Irish disease, of Irish poverty during the nineteenth century a black picture of material decay that literally “cries to Heaven” for redress.

Side by side with these statistics, too, we have others to clinch the evidence which traces the cause to the Act of Union. For the nineteenth century was no century of decay. On the contrary, in almost every other Western country, and especially in countries of the same racial and religious fusion in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in the British Colonies the nineteenth century was a period of rising population, advancing commerce, and abounding prosperity.

Nor is it the fact that British Ministers had any deliberate malice against Ireland. On the contrary, many noble Englishmen worked themselves grey during the nineteenth century in their efforts to make the best of the Union system. Viceroy after Viceroy, and Chief Secretary after Chief Secretary, have gone to Ireland full of hope, and have come back converted reluctantly to the admission that their efforts have been in vain and their work wasted under the present form of Government.

“For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administered is best”

sang Pope. But there are some forms of government so bad that they cannot be well administered. Among them is the form of government established under the Act of Union.

Unionist writers who are honest enough to admit the decay of Ireland between 1800-1900 attempt to trace it to any other cause than the Act of Union to over-population, to the Catholic religion, to the Irish character, or even to the potato. But they labour in vain. If Ireland stood alone, they might succeed. But it does not stand alone. Precisely at the time when Ireland was decaying, all other Western nations were flourishing. Precisely when the Irish race was withering in Ireland, the same race, with the same religion and the same national characteristics, was prospering exceedingly in America, and was even contributing much of the power, skill and value for building up the white British Colonies.

Unvarying progress on one side on the other, unvarying decline, until checked by the willingness of England to listen to the voice of Ireland. What evidence could you have more convincing, what witnesses more eloquent?

Perhaps, indeed, the most convincing statement of this very case was given to the world, not by an Irishman or by any Liberal statesman, but by the great Lord Salisbury. Speaking in 1865 as Lord Robert Cecil, he uttered the following wise and statesmanlike summary of the policy of the Union up to that date:

“What is the reason that a people with so bountiful a soil, with such enormous resources (as the Irish), lag so far behind the English in the race? Some say that it is to be found in the character of the Celtic race, but I look to France, and I see a Celtic race there going forward in the path of prosperity with most rapid strides I believe at the present moment more rapidly than England herself. Some people say that it is to be found in the Roman Catholic religion; but I look to Belgium, and there I see a people second to none in Europe, except the English, for industry, singularly prosperous, considering the small space of country that they occupy, having improved to the utmost the natural resources of that country, but distinguished among all the peoples of Europe for the earnestness and intensity of their Roman Catholic belief. Therefore, I cannot say that the cause of the Irish distress is to be found in the Roman Catholic religion. An hon. friend near me says that it arises from the Irish people listening to demagogues. I have as much dislike to demagogues as he has, but when I look to the Northern States of America I see there people who listen to demagogues, but who undoubtedly have not been wanting in material prosperity. It cannot be demagogues, Romanism, or the Celtic race. What then is it? I am afraid that the one thing which has been peculiar to Ireland has been the Government of England."

Nothing has occurred since 1865 to vary that judgment.

THE HOME RULE FIVE

So much for the one century of Union. What about the five of Home Rule?

“Were there no black centuries before 1800? Had Ireland no grievances? What of the ‘curse of Cromwell,’ the broken ‘Treaty of Limerick,’ and the penal laws?”

Thus I shall be challenged.

There were, indeed, black centuries before 1800, and black events. Ireland endured a special share of the agony inflicted upon Europe by the great religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She suffered, perhaps, more than any other country from the divisions of Christian Europe following on the revolt of Luther against Rome in 1520. The statutory limitations of the Irish Parliament during that period led to many interferences from England, and the gradual exclusion of Catholics divided the Parliament from the Irish nation. The artificial infusion of a fanatical Protestant population by James I. and Cromwell produced a terrible embitterment of the struggle. There were crimes on both sides, and calamities beyond telling. But, with all that, it is still to be doubted whether any of those centuries presents such a picture of national decay, both industrial and social, as is presented by the Ireland of the nineteenth century.

For through the blackness of that night the Irish Parliament always shone like a star. Ireland grew with its growth, and withered with its decay. Precisely as she had more Home Rule she advanced, and precisely as she had less she fell back. But as long as the Parliament existed at all it could never be said that the final spark of liberty had been stamped out.

Even in the eighteenth century, when Catholic Ireland seemed to be crushed, and Ireland lay supine beneath the double weight of the penal laws and the commercial restrictions of England an Ireland pictured for all time by the keen, merciless pen of Dean Swift still the vestal flame was not quite extinguished. Captured by ascendancy, dominated by fanaticism, narrowed to one faith, or even to one section of that faith, the Irish Parliament still always provided a framework and machinery for a possible moment of regeneration and recovery.

That moment came in 1782 came, unhappily both for England and for Ireland, in such a form as to seem to justify the hard saying “England’s danger is Ireland’s opportunity.”

The story of 1782 has been told with surpassing brilliancy in the greatest of all Mr. Lecky’s books the darling of his youth and the worry of his old age his “Leaders of Irish Public Opinion." The disastrous and wasting struggle against our own kith and kin in the American colonies forced on England by the folly of the same type of statesmen now resisting Home Rule had reduced these islands to an almost defenceless condition. The British Army, intended for the defence of Great Britain, had been sent away into the forests and prairies of Northern America to fight an invisible foe, and to meet with a disastrous and undeserved defeat. But in their blind passion to subdue the Americans the British Government had for the moment forgotten Ireland. In their eagerness to conquer their colonies they had forgotten to maintain their hold on the half-conquered country at their side. The British troops had been withdrawn from Ireland as well as from England. At that dramatic moment France came into the struggle with her fleet, and Ireland, with her great harbours and her accessible coastline, could not be left defenceless. As Ireland had no British troops to defend her, it was inevitable that she should be allowed to defend herself.

Ireland, never slow in a fight, rose to this crisis. In a few months there sprang up throughout the country that wonderful movement of the Irish Volunteers. Ireland in a few weeks produced an army that kept Europe from her shores. Sixty thousand Irishmen stood to arms. Ireland could no longer be hectored or bullied. She was, for the moment for the only time in her history mistress of her own fate.

The American War came to its only possible end with the grant of American Independence. Great Britain turned to look to her own domestic affairs, and found herself face to face with the possibility of a second war. For Ireland, having once armed to resist Europe, refused to disarm until she received her liberty. The Volunteers, in other words, would not disperse except on the conditions that the Irish Parliament should become a reality. Poynings’ Law was to be repealed. The right of legislative initiative was to be given back to the Irish Parliament, and England was to admit solemnly and categorically the right of Ireland to make laws for herself.

It was a tremendous demand, but the British Government had no choice except to yield. Exhausted with the American struggle, the British Ministers could not face a second war. The demands of Ireland were granted, and thus in a moment Grattan’s Parliament, in the full panoply of armed strength, sprang into existence.

Well might Grattan exclaim, at the opening of that Parliament, in words that still send a thrill through every true lover of freedom:

“I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a Nation! In that new character I now hail her! And, bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto Perpetua."