Had Ireland been left alone, she could easily have become more civilised through non-English influences than she is at present; and she could not conceivably have suffered from any other hands such horrors as she has done at the hands of England. Mr Balfour absurdly assumes that she would have remained exactly as she was in the time of Henry the Second. She could not possibly have done so, any more than England has done. English civilisation has developed under pressure of the general forces of European culture: Irish civilisation would of necessity have developed to some extent under the same forces. The greatest strides of European progress have been made since the invention of printing; and printing would have affected Irish life as it has done English. One of the greatest impulses to European commerce for thousands of years was the colonisation of North America. Ireland, left to herself, would naturally have profited by American trade in a high degree. The fact that English and Irish passengers for the United States embark for the main passage at Liverpool, and not on the west coast of Ireland, is one of the standing evidences of how the chances of Ireland were deliberately frustrated by English and pro-English action. It is not a hundred years since Irish trade was relieved of the wicked English laws made to repress it; for when Pitt in 1785 wisely strove to make an end of them, he was baffled by the Irish Parliament itself, which represented merely the landowners connected with the established Church, who cared nothing for Irish manufactures, these being mostly carried on by Papists and Dissenters. And it is just sixty-five years since Irish life was relieved of the wicked sectarian laws framed in the interests of English Protestantism.

English wickedness-that is one half of the story: English blundering, that is the other half. The extent of the blundering might alone suffice to dispose of the idle boast that the English race has a special faculty for politics. No country in Christian Europe, not even Russia with Poland, has such a colossal failure standing to its account. Brutal Englishmen saw long ago the sentimentalist and idealist Spenser saw-that the only way to make peace in Ireland was to make it either all English or all Irish. English statecraft never got further than to introduce enough of the alien element to keep Ireland for ever distracted under English supremacy. And the English supremacy has wrought in addition to other desperate evils the profound economic evil of drawing the land-owning class to England, so that a large share of the produce of Ireland—what she was

allowed to produce-has for generations been exported as sheer tribute. Now, a self-governed country situated as Ireland is, if its landowners went voluntarily to reside in England, would be led in natural course of policy to deal with that evil by specially taxing rental; and a self-governed Ireland, under a democratic system, would infallibly legislate in that direction. Such legislation was eagerly proposed last century. But the old Irish Parliament was a mere preserve of the landowners, who ruled in their own interest; and the predominant English landowning class has since ruled Ireland according to its own class policy, from which Ireland has suffered immeasurably more than England has done, owing precisely to the special factor of absenteeism.

I am well aware that all the evils wrought in Ireland by bad government have been terribly aggravated by the blind multiplication of the people: I have elsewhere pointed this out in confutation of the one-sided doctrine of Mr Henry George, who refuses to see the force of the law of population. But I will here add, on that head, that in all reasonable probability overpopulation in Ireland would never have run to the extent it has done if the Irish people had been left in modern times to deal with their own land question. Of all the senseless catchwords of English race prejudice the most execrable is that which alleges the innate recklessness of "the Celt." Parental and other prudence has nowhere been more rigorously practised than in France; and English prejudice, as represented by Tennyson, sees "the Celt" personified in France whenever Frenchmen do a foolish thing that England does not happen to be doing at the moment. For that matter, however, the fact that Englishmen have any given state of things inside their own doors has never hindered them from exclaiming at the same state of things among their neighbours. Within the past six months we have had endless head-wagging in England over the "corruption revealed in France by the Panama scandal, while we have had on our own hands at least three scandals of the same sort, all of them gigantic, if singly less gigantic than that of the Panama undertaking, which is simply the greatest because France is unhappily the most parsimonious and investment-seeking nation.

Mr Balfour was loudly applauded by his followers, as was to be expected, when he protested against English politicians going about denouncing England. That is none the less the best service an Englishman can do to England, in connection with 1 See the Wealth of Nations, B. v., ch. 2, M'Culloch's ed., p. 405.

the Irish issue; and we shall never put our politics on a scientific basis till we have substituted for the childish and vulgar habit of national self-praise the habit of national self-criticism. Mr Balfour's plan is the immemorial method of the empiric, fooling his hearers with elementary flattery, and turning all history to the account of the most puerile instincts. To tell in plain English what England did to Ireland under Elizabeth, and under Cromwell, is to tell one of the most awful tales of blood and devastation that human history retains. The bare recital of the facts haunts one like a nightmare. Again and again we read of systematic massacres of men, women, and children; but that is next to nothing in comparison with the rest. It is the everrecurring picture of subterhuman misery among the survivors that burns itself in on the mind-the picture of tribes of human beings driven to die of slow hunger in the wilderness, like wild beasts; of gaunt wretches, unable to stand erect, crawling out of ditches to feed on corpses by way of change from feeding on weeds. Englishmen have in the past recorded these things without a thought of remorse for bringing them about; and at the very time that these Irish horrors were happening, or still fresh in memory, Englishmen were vociferous in denouncing the cruelties of the Spaniards and the Dutch to the lower races who fell into their clutches. "Creeping hypocrisy" could not go further than blatant national self-righteousness had done in these matters. The nation which has wrought the wickedness has ever had a hundred words of abuse for the victim against one word of self-reproach. If there were any utility or any sense in keeping up national animosities, Irishmen might well hate England with a desperate hatred; and the wonder is, not that they have so hated her, but that so many of them have been so soon able to put the old passion aside. They have learned or are learning the lesson that national animosities are only the reverse side of the old insane ferocities which gave rise to them; and that to hate our fellow creatures because their ancestors injured ours is to approximate to the ethical standards of the dead wrongdoers. And the lesson would be learned still more rapidly on the Irish side—that is, on the Irish Nationalist side-were it not for the fatuity and the prejudice displayed on the so-called Unionist side in England; in the speeches of Mr Chamberlain, who vituperates the men with whom he once caballed against his own colleagues; in the speeches of inept aristocrats like Sir Henry Chaplin, the very types of the political incompetence that has created the Irish problem; in the speeches of perverse

partisan leaders like Mr Balfour, who elect to be the political hewers of wood and drawers of water for fanatics in whose religion they can only sham belief, and for dullards in whose ideals of life they can only wearily affect to share. It is strictly accurate to say that there are not now more than two prominent Unionists in Parliament who ever exhibited the true spirit of union towards Ireland in the days-as late as ten years ago— when some of us still vainly hoped that England might learn to treat Ireland in Parliament as an integral part of the Union. The men who now call themselves Unionist are almost invariably those who are incapable of real unionism. All things considered, we shall be wonderfully lucky if, with such a dead weight of unreasoning prejudice among us still, we can so much as cut the knot of the Irish problem by Mr Gladstone's measure, leaving the loose ends to be dealt with later.

EPILOGUE.

A PROGRAM FOR IRELAND.

"1

SINCE 1886 it has become clear that the English Parliament cannot be looked to for any solution of the Irish problem save that which is a solution on the English side-the letting Ireland manage her own affairs. As Mill put it thirty years ago, "the difficulty of governing Ireland lies entirely in our own minds: it is a difficulty of understanding." That lack of intelligence is palpable still, and it will long subsist, inasmuch as the interest of the rich idle class is bound up with the misunderstanding of other people's. England, with her enormous industry resting on a basis of vanishing coal, is still too far from being face to face with the fundamental facts of her existence to permit of her people being driven to put it on a scientific footing. With Ireland, the case is different. She has been only too long at handgrips with nature not to know, throughout her population, exactly where at least half of her problem lies. And it may be hoped that when the Irish people get Home Rule they will approach the solution.

Inasmuch, then, as Home Rule is the indispensable first step, any program for Ireland must include a Home Rule scheme; and as the failure of Mr Gladstone's is in large part due to its own faults, it may be worth while to offer an outline of another.

§ 1. A Federal Constitution.

The obviously indefensible point of Mr Gladstone's plan is the illogical relation it would create between Ireland and the imperial Parliament. On his lines there are open only the alternative courses of (a) excluding all Irish representatives from the imperial Parliament, while taxing Ireland for imperial purposes, and (6) admitting Irish members to the imperial Parliament, in any number to be agreed upon, thus permitting Ireland to have a share in controlling English and Scotch home affairs while 1 England and Ireland, p. 47.