principles like these, as upon a
rock; and already the good effects are seen in the new friendliness
which has arisen between the English masses and the people of Ireland,
and in the better temper with which, despite the acrimony of some
prominent politicians, the relations of the two peoples are discussed.
When one looks round the horizon it is still far from clear; nor can we
say from which quarter fair weather will arrive. But the air is fresher,
and the clouds are breaking overhead.

       *       *       *       *       *

POSTSCRIPT.

What has happened since the above paragraphs were written, ten months
ago, has confirmed more quickly and completely than the writer expected
the forecasts they contain. Home Rule is no longer a word of terror,
even to those English and Scotch voters who were opposed to it in July,
1886. Most sensible men in the Tory and Dissentient Liberal camps have
come to see that it is inevitable; and, while they continue to resist
it for the sake of what is called consistency, or because they do not
yet see in what form it is to be granted, they are disposed to regard
its speedy arrival as the best method of retreat from an indefensible
position.

The repressive policy which the present Ministry are attempting in
Ireland--for in the face of their failures one cannot say that they are
carrying out any policy--is rendering Coercion Acts more and more
detested by the English people. The actualities of Ireland, the social
condition of her peasantry, the unwisdom of the dominant caste, the
incompetence of the bureaucracy which affects to rule her, are being, by
the full accounts we now receive, brought home to the mind of England
and Scotland as they never were before, and produce their appropriate
effect upon the heart and conscience of the people. The recognition by
the Liberal party of the rights of Ireland, the visits of English
Liberals to Ireland, the work done by Irishmen in English
constituencies, are creating a feeling of unity and reciprocal interest
between the masses of the people on both sides of the Channel without
example in the seven hundred years that have passed since Strongbow's
landing.

This was the thing most needed to make Home Rule safe and full of
promise, because it affords a guarantee that in such political contests
as may arise in future, the division will not be, as heretofore, between
the Irish people on the one side and the power of Britain on the other,
but between two parties, each of which will have adherents in both
islands. We may now at last hope that national hatreds will vanish; that
England will unlearn her arrogance and Ireland her suspicion; that the
basis is being laid for a harmonious co-operation of both nations in
promoting the welfare and greatness of a common Empire.

Many of the Irish patriots of 1798 and 1848 desired Separation, because
they thought that Ireland, attached to England, could never be more
than the obscure satellite of a greater State. When Ireland has been
heartily welcomed by the democracy of Great Britain as an equal partner,
the ground for any such desire will have disappeared, and Union will
rest on a foundation firmer than has ever before existed. Ireland will
feel, when those rights of self-government have been secured for which
she has pleaded so long, that she owes them, not only to her own
tenacity and courage, but to the magnanimity, the justice, and the
freely given sympathy of the English and Scottish people.

_October_, 1887.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 69: This article, which originally appeared in the American
_New Princeton Review_, has been added to in a few places, in order to
bring its narrative of facts up to date.]

[Footnote 70: The experience of the last few months, which has shown us
rural Boards of Guardians and municipal bodies over four-fifths of
Ireland displaying their zeal in the Nationalist cause, has amply
confirmed this anticipation, expressed nearly a year ago.]




SOME ARGUMENTS CONSIDERED.[71]

BY JOHN MORLEY.


It is a favourite line of argument to show that we have no choice
between the maintenance of the Union and the concession to Ireland of
national independence. The evils of Irish independence are universally
reckoned by Englishmen to be so intolerable that we shall never agree to
it. The evils of Home Rule are even more intolerable still. Therefore,
it is said, if we shall never willingly bring the latter upon our heads,
_а fortiori_ we ought on no account to invite the former. The business
in hand, however, is not a theorem, but a problem; it is not a thesis to
be proved, but a malady to be cured; and the world will thank only the
reasoner who winds up, not with Q.E.D., but with Q.E.F. To reason that a
patient ought not to take a given medicine because it may possibly cause
him more pain than some other medicine which he has no intention of
taking, is curiously oblique logic. The question is not oblique; it is
direct. Will the operation do more harm to his constitution than the
slow corrosions of a disorder grown inveterate? Are the conditions of
the connection between England and Ireland, as laid down in the Act of
Union, incapable of improvement? Is the present working of these
conditions more prosperous and hopeful, or happier for Irish order and
for English institutions, than any practicable proposal that it is
within the compass of statesmanship to devise, and of civic sense to
accept and to work? That is the question.

Some people contend that the burden of making out a case rests on the
advocate of change, and not on those who support things as they are. But
who supports things as they are? Things as they are have become
insupportable. If you make any of the constitutional changes that have
been proposed, we are told, parliamentary government, as Englishmen now
know it, is at an end; and our critic stands amazed at those "who deem
it a slighter danger to innovate on the Act of Union than to remodel the
procedure of the House of Commons." As if that were the alternative.
Great changes in the rules may do other good things, but no single
competent authority believes that in this particular they will do the
thing that we want. We cannot avoid constitutional changes. It is made
matter of crushing rebuke that the Irish proposals of the late
Government were an innovation on the old constitution of the realm. But
everybody knows that, while ancient forms have survived, the last
hundred years have witnessed a long succession of silent but most
profound innovations. It was shortsighted to assume that the
redistribution of political power that took place in 1884-5 was the last
chapter of the history of constitutional change. It ought to have been
foreseen that new possessors of power, both Irish and British, would
press for objects the pursuit of which would certainly involve further
novelties in the methods and machinery of government. Every given
innovation must be rigorously scrutinized, but in the mere change or in
the fact of innovation there is no valid reproach. When one of the
plans for the better government of Ireland is described as depriving
parliamentary institutions of their elasticity and strength, as
weakening the Executive at home, and lessening the power of the country
to resist foreign attack, no careful observer of the events of the last
seven years can fail to see that all this evil has already got its grip
upon us. Mr. Dicey himself admits it. "Great Britain," he says, "if left
to herself, could act with all the force, consistency, and energy given
by unity of sentiment and community of interests. The obstruction and
the uncertainty of our political aims, the feebleness and inconsistency
with which they are pursued, arise in part at least from the connection
with Ireland." So then, after all, it is feebleness and inconsistency,
not elasticity and strength, that mark our institutions as they stand;
feebleness and inconsistency, distraction and uncertainty. The supporter
of things as they are is decidedly as much concerned in making out a
case as the advocate of change.

The strength of the argument from Nationality is great, and full of
significance; but Nationality is not the whole essence of either the
argument from History or the argument from Self-government. Their force
lies in considerations of political expediency as tested by practical
experience.

The point of the argument from the lessons of History is that for some
reason or another the international concern, whose unlucky affairs we
are now trying to unravel, has always been carried on at a loss: the
point of the argument from Self-government is that the loss would have
been avoided if the Irish shareholders had for a certain number of the
transactions been more influentially represented on the Board. That is
quite apart from the sentiment of pure nationality. The failure has come
about, not simply because the laws were not made by Irishmen as such,
but because they were not made by the men who knew most about Ireland.
The vice of the connection between the two countries has been the
stupidity of governing a country without regard to the interests or
customs, the peculiar objects and peculiar experiences, of the great
majority of the people who live in it. It is not enough to say that the
failures of England in Ireland have to a great extent flowed from causes
too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of
rulers or of subjects. We readily admit that, but it is not the point.
It is not enough to insist that James I., in his plantations and
transplantations, probably meant well to his Irish subjects. Probably he
did. That is not the question. If it is "absolutely certain that his
policy worked gross wrong," what is the explanation and the defence? We
are quite content with Mr. Dicey's own answer. "Ignorance and want of
sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended
reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case
is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English
attempts to reform and improve Ireland." This description would apply,
with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates
Act in the reign of Queen Victoria. That memorable measure, as Mr.
Gladstone said, was due not to the action of a party, but to the action
of a Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was hardly less responsible for it than
Lord John Russell. "We produced it," said Mr. Gladstone, "with a
general, lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention of taking
capital to Ireland. What did we do? We sold the improvements of the
tenants" (House of Commons, April 16). It is the same story, from the
first chapter to the last, in education, poor law, public works, relief
Acts, even in coercion Acts--lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good
intention. That is the argument from history. When we are asked what
good law an Irish Parliament would make that could not equally well be
made by the Parliament at Westminster, this is the answer. It is not
the will, it is the intelligence, that is wanting. We all know what the
past has been. Why should the future be different?

"It is an inherent condition of human affairs," said Mill in a book
which, in spite of some chimeras, is a wholesome corrective of the
teaching of our new jurists, "that no intention, however sincere, of
protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie
up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own
hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their
circumstances in life be worked out" (_Repres. Government_, p. 57). It
is these wise lessons from human experience to which the advocate of
Home Rule appeals, and not the wild doctrine that any body of persons
claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses _an inherent
and divine right_ to be treated as an independent community. It is quite
true that circumstances sometimes justify a temporary dictatorship. In
that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary
dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called
temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and
decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward
utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and
divine rights, or any other form of political moonshine.

There are some who believe that an honest centralized administration of
impartial officials, and not Local Self-Government, would best meet the
real wants of the people. In other words, everything is to be for the
people, nothing by the people--which has not hitherto been a Liberal
principle. Something, however, may be said for this view, provided that
the source of the authority of such an administration be acceptable.
Austrian administration in Lombardy was good rather than bad, yet it was
hated and resisted because it was Austrian and not Italian. No rational
person can hold for an instant that the source of a