CHAPTER II. SINCE THE UNION.I

THERE runs through the history of Ireland during the nineteenth century a sort of systematic rise and fall that is distressing to contemplate. The movement in which each effort took shape differed very little from the one that went before it and the one that was to come after it. Between them there intervened periods of dire national prostration and universal distress. At such times the nation seemed, as it were, dead, and the people lay inert, an easy prey to every form of corruption. The cause at stake in each movement was indeed different. But in each the people had to encounter the same difficulties, fell into the same errors, suffered from the same illusions. In each movement we find the same lack of preparation and perseverance, the same want of completeness. Favourable opportunities were ever let slip. The movements did not always end in failure, but they never achieved more than partial success. The same tragedy was re-enacted in every generation upon the same stage with dreary monotony. The actors alone were changed.

I See especially on the history of Ireland in the 19th century the following general works :-Edouard Hervé, la Crise Irlandaise, Paris, 1885. F. de Pressensé, l'Irlande et l'Angleterre depuis l'Acte d'Union jusqu'à nos jours, Paris, 1889. O'Connor Morris, Ireland from 1798 to 1898, London, 1898. J. H. MacCarthy, Ireland since the Union, London, 1887. A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland, London, 1877. W. E. H. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 2nd edition, London, 1871, and 3rd edition, London, 1903. R. Barry O'Brien, Fifty Years Concessions to Ireland, London, 1883-1885. By the same author, Irish Wrongs and English Remedies, London, 1887. By the same author, A Hundred Years of Irish History, London, 1902. T. P. O'Connor, The Parnell Movement, London, 1886. Isaac Butt, Irish People and Irish Land, London, 1867. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, London and New York, 1904. Sir J. Barrington, Sketches of his Own Times, Londen, 1869. Greville Memoirs, London, 1885.

Throughout all these vicissitudes another contest is seen in progress. There were at all times two rival factions side by side in the Irish camp. On one side stood constitutional agitation within the law, an agitation open and unconcealed, loud-voiced, aiming not at complete separation from England, but at the attainment of self-government for Ireland. On the other side we find Fenianism, or the "Physical Force Movement," as the Irish call it. Secret in its methods, uncompromising in its ends, it recked little what means it should employ to achieve by revolution that complete separation from Britain at which it aimed. Between these two movements there was established a sort of oscillation. As either of them grew weaker the other invariably grew stronger. No sooner did the Government suppress legal agitation than an agitation of an illegal character took its place.

On the English side there is the like weary monotony. The fervent patriotism, the passionate enthusiasm of the Irish, is countered by inertia combined with a rooted egotism and indifference. In each generation throughout the century affairs passed through the same cycle. First there is the definite refusal to listen to Irish grievances; complaints are treated with mockery and insult; statesmen shrug their shoulders and adopt an attitude of nonpossumus. Then the Irish begin to support their demands by acts of violence. The Government reply by passing Coercion Acts-that is to say, a sort of "martial law," or "law of suspects," contenting themselves, in Lord Cowper's phrase, with driving discontent beneath the surface. Forgetting the famous saying of John Bright that "force is no remedy," they adopt a policy of mere repression unaccompanied by reform. Meantime, anarchy continues to increase, till at last, in the hope of putting a stop to it, the Government is forced to give way. They surrender, but only when matters have reached the worst pass, and they are induced to do so not by considerations of justice, but by dread of revolution. A premium was thus put upon disorder. Civil war was positively

encouraged, and the Irish were not slow to draw the moral. They soon perceived that no reform could be obtained from England upon its merits, that there was nothing but could be won by agitation. Gladstone himself declared that had it not been for the Land League the Land Act of 1881 would never have been passed. And before Gladstone's time, Lord John Russell, also a Liberal, had said bluntly to his fellow-countrymen : "Your oppressions have taught the Irish to hate, your concessions to brave you. You have exhibited to them how scanty was the stream of your bounty, how full the tribute of your fear."2 Again, had English concessions ever been broad and honest measures, serious and straightforward attempts to settle questions, Ireland might have been conciliated, and perhaps cured. But the English at all times neglected the advice of Grattan, that refusals should ever be polite, concessions gracious. Worse still, these tardy reforms, wrung from England against her will, failed in their effect for the most part. They did not go far enough, were sometimes purely illusory, and at all times bought at too dear a price. Ireland had need of courageous and drastic remedies. English legislation was hesitating and insufficient. It required, for instance, no less than five Land Acts from 1881 to 1896 to organise the system of judicial rent-fixing. Again, England sought to impose on Ireland her own legislative notions, her Poor Law and her system of education, for instance, and never stopped to consider whether such ideas were repugnant to the feelings of Irishmen, whether, as Lord Rosebery put it, Irishmen might not prefer their own familiar potatoes to the truffles which they neither knew nor appreciated. The English Government made it a point never to consult Irishmen as to what remedies should be applied. In the words of Swift, they sent the medicine from a distance, and had it applied by a doctor who knew neither the patient nor the malady.

2 Quoted by Barry R. O'Brien, A Hundred Years of Irish History, p. 119 and 122.

The more liberal the English Parliament shows itself in its dealings with Scotland, the more illiberal it is in its treatment of Ireland. It never gets beyond half measures and compromises; takes away with one hand what it gives with the other; and clogs every concession with conditions which practically cancel it. Two examples

out of a great number will suffice. A system of outdoor relief for the poor was instituted by an Act of the year 1838. All peasants who worked a quarter of an acre or more, that is to say, the great majority of Irish peasants, were excluded from its operation. In the same year the peasants were relieved from paying tithes to the Protestant Church, and the tithes were put upon the landlords. But the landlords were left free to raise the rents by a corresponding amount. In the result, the peasants remained liable to the same burden as before, but had not the same opportunities of complaint. In everything else it was the same. Ireland soon came to rate at their true value those magnanimous concessions made by British Liberalism, those cunning and illusory devices which took away the shadow of a grievance and left the substance.

I. O'CONNELL,3

In the year 1800, after the passing of the Act of Union, as in 1691 after the Treaty of Limerick, a favourable opportunity was offered to the English Government of redeeming the past and conciliating Ireland, by adopting a policy of concord and good will. In Grattan's phrase,

3 See especially, on the period 1800-1847, the works of Sidney Smith; the Life, Memoirs and Correspondence of Melbourne, Palmerston, and Peel; the Speeches of O'Connell and Shiel. Th. Wyse, Historical Sketch of the Catholic Association, London, 1829. Life, Times and Correspondenoe of Right Rev. Doctor Doyle, by W. J. Fitzpatrick, Dublin, 1880. Sir C. G. Duffy, Young Ireland, London, 1880, and Four Years of Irish History, London, 1883. Shaw Lefevre, Peel and O'Connell, London, 1887. Guizot, Sir Robert Peel, Paris, 1856. Fitzpatrick, D. O'Connell's Correspondence, London, 1888. Barry O'Brien, Th. Drummond, London, 1889. Canon O'Rourke, Life of O'Connell, London, 1875. MacLennan, Life of Thomas Drummond, Edinburgh, 1867. Cf. Nemours Godre, Daniel O'Connell, Paris, 1893.

the marriage had been brought about, and it now remained to make it fruitful. The two parliaments had been united. It remained to unite the two peoples, to bring the different classes together, to adopt measures of reparation, which should make up to Ireland for the evils wrought by commercial restraints and Penal Laws. This was precisely the policy that the English Government did not adopt. The Government had been centralised. The governed were neither reconciled nor united. Nay more, by the suppression of the Irish Parliament and the fusion of the two legislatures, the chasm between the two nations was widened.

"It was much less," writes G. de Beaumont,4 "the union of Ireland to England than an alliance between the English and the Protestant party in Ireland, who, being no longer able to govern Ireland, threw themselves into the arms of their ruler and handed over to him every instrument of tyranny and persecution, on condition that they should share in that tyranny as heretofore."

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After the Union, as before it, Ireland remained a " colony," or dependency." Its government was marred by all the abuses and all the oppression which that form of rule connotes. Government was based upon force or upon corruption. Coercion Acts became a permanent institution; and while the supreme power of the Ascendancy remained, it was relieved of all sense of responsibility, robbed even of that glamour of patriotism which had formerly illumed its actions, and left freer than ever to oppress the Catholics of Ireland, whom England abandoned to its mercy.

The Catholics of Ireland, indeed, after the Union, lay prostrate in a state of utter exhaustion and torpid despair. There was no hope for them. They were, to use a famous phrase, “like a corpse on the dissecting table." Public spirit was dead amongst them. "The country," as Shiel said, "was in a state of degrading and unwholesome tranquillity. We sat down like galley slaves in a calm 4 Op. cit. II., 17.