How idle are these calculations of profit and loss! The truth is that Ireland has taken her full share in winning and populating the Empire. The result is hers as much as Britain's. Mr. Redmond spoke for his countrymen last May* in saying: "We, as Irishmen, are not prepared to surrender our share in the heritage [that is, the British Empire] which our fathers created." That is sound sentiment and sound sense. It is the view taken by the Colonies, where Irishmen are known, respected, and understood, and where the support for Home Rule, based on personal experience of its blessings, has been, and remains, consistent and strong. Indeed, we miss the significance of that support if we do not realize that Irish Home Rule is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of the various parts of the Empire. Let us add the wider generalization that it is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of all the English-speaking races. It may be fairly computed that a fifth of the present white population of the United States is of Irish blood.† American opinion, as a whole, so far as it is directed towards Ireland and away from a host of absorbing domestic problems, is favourable to Home Rule. Irish-American opinion has never swerved, although it has become more sober, as the material condition of Ireland has improved, and the interests of Irish-Americans themselves have become more closely identified with those of their adopted country. Fenianism is altogether extinct. The extreme claim for the total separation of Ireland from Great Britain is now no more than a sentimental survival among a handful of the older men, of the fierce hatreds provoked by the miseries and

* At Woodford, May 27, 1911.

†This is a very general statement. No figures exist for an accurate computation. The Census of 1910 gives the total population of the United States, white and coloured, as 91,272,266, of whom nearly 9,000,000 are negroes. The figures about countries of origin are not yet available. The statistical abstract of the United States (1908) gives the total number of immigrants from Ireland from 1821 to 1908 as 4,168,747 (the large majority of whom must have been of marriageable age), but does not estimate the subsequent increase by marriage, and takes no account of the immigration prior to 1821, which was very large, especially in the period preceding the Revolutionary War of 1775-1782. At the Census of 1900 Irishmen actually born in Ireland and then resident in the United States are stated to have been 1,618,567, as compared with 93,682 from Wales, 233,977 from Scotland, and 842,078 from England.

horrors of an era which has passed away.* Even Mr. Patrick Ford and the Irish World have moderated their tone, and where that tone is still inflammatory it is not representative of Irish-American opinion. I have studied with a good deal of care the columns of that journal for some months back, smiling over the imaginary terrors of the nervous people on this side of the Atlantic who are taught by their party Press to believe that Mr. Patrick Ford is going to dynamite them in their beds. Any liberalminded student of history and human nature would pronounce the whole propaganda perfectly harmless. But the sane instinct that Ireland should have a local autonomy of her own, an instinct common to the whole brotherhood of nations which have sprung from these shores, lasts undiminished and takes shape, quite rightly and naturally, as it takes shape in the Colonies, in financial support of the Nationalist party in Ireland. Anti-British sentiment in the United States, once a grave international danger, is that no longer; but it does still represent an obstacle to the complete realization of an ideal which all patriotic men should aim at the formation of indestructible bonds of friendship between Great Britain and the United States. Nor must it be forgotten that the calm and reasonable character of Irish-American opinion is due in a large degree to confidence in the ultimate success of the constitutional movement here for Home Rule. Every successive defeat of that policy tends to embitter feeling in America.

Oh, for an hour of intelligent politics! The old choice is before us to make the best or the worst of the state of opinion in America; to disinter from ancient files of the Irish World sentences calculated to inflame an ignorant British audience; or to say in sensible and manly terms: "The situation is more favourable than it has been for a century past for the settlement of just Irish claims."

* I am especially indebted for information to Mr. Hugh Sutherland, of the North American (Philadelphia), to Mr. Rodman Wanamaker, of the same city, to Mr. Frank Sanborn, of Concord, and to Mr. John O'Callaghan, of Boston.

CHAPTER IX

IRELAND TO-DAY

WHY does present-day Ireland need Home Rule? I put the question in that way because I am not going to question the fact that she wants Home Rule. She has always said she wanted it she says so still, and that is enough. There is a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There always have been minorities more or less powerful against Home Rule in all ages and places. That does not alter the national character of the claim. If once we go behind the voice of a people, constitutionally expressed, we court endless risks. National leaders have always been called "agitators,” which, of course, they are, and non-representative agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of a claim which is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions to measures of Home Rule. The denial is generally irreconcilable with the case made for the dangers of Home Rule, and that contradiction in its most glaring shape characterizes the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my part I shall assume that the large majority of Irishmen, as shown by successive electoral votes, want Home Rule. Precisely what form of Home Rule they want is another and by no means so clear a matter, on which I shall presently have a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to manage their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of Ireland if that was not her desire.

What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is the deep spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule? A craving for self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is synonymous with the growth of independent character. That is why Ireland instinctively and passionately wants it, that

is why she needs it, and that is why Great Britain, for her own sake, and Ireland's, should give it. If that is not the reason, it is idle to talk about Home Rule ; but it is the reason.

Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness, and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot discern the profound effect of political institutions upon human character. Self-government in the community corresponds to free will in the individual. I am far from saying that selfgovernment is everything. But I do say that it is the masterkey. It is fundamental. Give responsibility and you will create responsibility. Through political responsibility only can a society brace itself to organized effort, find out its own opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and elicit the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems.

These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the contrary. But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland. There "good government has been held to be "a substitute for self-government" and a régime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In this paternal régime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.* Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,† were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their countrymen. The methods of these men were destructive. They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own economic evils. It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement *See pp. 13-17 and 66-71. † Dealt with fully in Chapter XIV.

by harnessing it to the land question. True; but what a strange way of expressing a truth! Anywhere outside Ireland men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a bad land system.

With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British statesmanship. With the exception of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George Wyndham-efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish Unionists-to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 another. In the following year came the Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham's great Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange "devolutionist " episode, arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell to the post of Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, the Government who selected him being fully aware that he was in favour of some change in the government of Ireland. He entered into relations with a group of prominent Irishmen, headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a scheme for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became known, there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. Mr. Wyndham, who had been a popular Chief Secretary, resigned office, and was succeeded by Mr. Walter Long ; perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in modern times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and direct defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority of Irishmen.