or different feeling, when every dispute on the subject brings out the fact that one of the main inspirations of their cause is positive ill-will to the bulk of the people with whom they insist on remaining so peculiarly "united." "united." So far are even the leaders of the Unionist party from a critical consciousness of their own position, that they have habitually opposed the project of Home Rule on the score that it has been supported only by a majority of English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish together, not by a majority of Englishmen separately. Such a plea is of course the negation of the very principle of union insisted on; and the fallacy it represents could only be fallen into by men too strongly swayed by an animus to frame for themselves a logical doctrine.

That there are some men who took up the "Unionist" position on better grounds, it would of course be unfair to deny. As one of those who, before the sudden change of Mr Gladstone's policy, deprecated the Home Rule solution, pointed out its conceivable dangers, and pleaded for a solution by way of real union, I have no difficulty in understanding as much. It is moreover obvious to all candid disputants that the very principle of Home Rule at certain points works logically against simple Nationalism; the case of Ulster furnished many Liberals with a fair argument against Mr Gladstone's solutions. But it is the hard fate of those who stand on the side of the party of prejudice, that they inevitably take on the colour of their surroundings; and I have seen Celtophobia developed by contagion in men who once seemed incapable of it. The most pathetic illustration I have met with, was supplied by some esteemed Liberal-Unionists in a discussion over this very proposition, that their cause stood for racial malice. They could justly argue, as against the school of uncritical Irish Nationalists, that there are abundant sources of evil in Irish conditions apart from English interference. But they took the further line of denying that illwill to "the Celt" had ever been common in England, and asserted that, on the contrary, while Irishmen in England are allowed free scope for all their powers, the Irish Nationalists aim at the exclusion of Englishmen from Ireland. For this last assertion, the sole justification was the bare citation of the current phrase, “Ireland for the Irish." Now, everybody knows that that phrase is simply a short way of putting the claim that the laws specially affecting Irish life shall be made by the Irish people, through an Irish Parliament. It is surely too idle to pretend that a party of whose leading members many are settled in England, intending to remain there for life, has any idea of

setting up a war of reprisals which would injure a hundred Irishmen for one Englishman. When Liberal-Unionists, then, come to be capable of thus representing the case, we are bound to conclude that their environment has acted on their temperament to the point of making them develop race prejudice, even if they set out as fair reasoners.

There is, in fact, no alternative open to them save that between embitterment and disillusionment. Those of us who, before 1883, hoped to see the problem solved by a really "unionist" policy, had only to wait till 1886 to see that we had hoped for too much. It then became clear that not only the bulk of the English people, but those who specially stand for "the Union," are essentially incapable of unionistic politics. True unionism would mean the cordial deliberation of all four elements of the House of Commons-English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh-on all questions which come before them, whether Irish, Welsh, Scotch, or English. But the majority of the English members never disguise, and never have disguised, that Irish and Scotch and Welsh questions are for them either a bore or a nuisance, and that they only deal with them perforce. The recurrence of an Irish problem every few years they regard as an unwarrantable strain on their patience. They sit through or vote upon Irish debates because party pressure makes them; they deal with the question of Welsh Disestablishment because they cannot help it; they gladly leave Scotch questions, wherever the whips permit it, to be dealt with by the Scotch members at the close of the Session. In this state of things the parade of Unionism is a farce. Englishmen, it must be plainly said, are in the lump incapable of a real legislative union with provinces whose domestic problems need separate legislative treatment. do not say this by way of invective. It is simply a sociological fact which ought to be reckoned with by practical politicians. And it follows from this fact, that even a well-meaning English effort to unite Ireland with England under the present constitution must end either in confession of miscalculation or in irrational embitterment against Ireland, as a gratuitously froward nation. Many Englishmen have thus indignantly decided, with regard to Ireland, that "the dog, to gain his private ends, went mad, and bit the man." When we turn to what ought to be the most rational statement of the "Unionist" case against Home Rule, that of a University Professor of Law, we find, breaking intermittently through the surface of quasi-scientific argument, gasps of the mere rage of race-prejudice and faction. The voice of the Irish

I

majority, Mr Dicey tells us, "is the voice of Ireland in the same sense in which a century ago the shouts or yells of the Jacobin Club were the voice of France."1 The Parnell movement, as a whole, is for Mr Dicey a "base conspiracy."2 When the professedly cool and qualified spokesman of the cool and self-controlled race takes this tone, the degree of coolness and selfcontrol of his faction in general can be readily estimated.3

The situation is thus in some respects less hopeful, more embittered, than it was thirty or fifty years ago. The pseudonymous Irish author of a work on the Irish problem fifty years ago, could say that "the enlightened English of every sect acknowledge that the Irish have always been an oppressed and injured people they value their generous efforts in the great cause of civil and religious liberty; and they wish for the establishment of a lasting friendship between the two countries, whose energies and industry should always render them emulous of each other, but who have been made almost enemies by the detestable policy of interested and corrupt statesmen." 4 And Mr John George MacCarthy of Cork, writing his excellent work on the land question in 1870, could say that "the Pall Mall Gazette and other leading journals have repeatedly and reasonably asked Irishmen to tell clearly and quietly what they wish in reference to the Irish land questions, and for what reasons they wish it." We are to-day in a less wholesome atmosphere. In the generation from 1840 to 1870, whatever were the policy of English statesmen, the literary lead in such matters lay with the school of Mill, the school of reason and science. To-day we have gone distinctly backwards. Since 1880 there has been much Celtophobic writing by distinguished literary men; the opportunist politics of Mr Gladstone has ended in a marked reaction; and though as of old there is small sign of political wisdom or knowledge on the Conservative side, there is plenty of literary prestige. It seems as if the ten years of adroit aggression in Parliament and in the constituencies by the Nationalist party under Mr Parnell, the

1A Leap in the Dark, by A. V. Dicey, 1893, p. 147.

2 Id., p. 137.

3 It is instructive to note that in 1893 Mr Dicey pointed to the demand for an amnesty for imprisoned dynamiters as one of the aspects of the Irish cause which proved the unfitness of Irish Nationalists to wield any executive power. Now (1896) the dynamiters have been released by the Unionist Government, by way of buying Irish votes.

4 Ireland as a Kingdom and a Colony, by "Brian Borohme the Younger,"

anger roused by dynamite outrages, and the excitement of the final right-about-face of Mr Gladstone, had together roused dormant elements of unreason in the English people.

It is true that the tactical exigencies of the situation have modified alike the stolid refusal of the English majority to deal with the economic Irish problem on its merits, and the tendency to meet all Irish protest with primitive insult. One tentative Land Bill after another has carried us so far from the old position of laissez-faire, that we see a Conservative Government quarrel with the Irish landlords in the interests of the Ulster tenants, whom it fears to drive over to the side of Home Rule; and the comradeship of "loyal" Irish in general has imposed on Anglican prejudice some restraint of aspersion against "the Celt." None the less, the two hindrances remain. English curative legislation, above all Conservative legislation, is always behind the development of the economic problem, which of necessity modifies from year to year with the changing economic conditions; and English sentiment will always tend to be strongly anti-Irish so long as Irishmen lay their troubles at England's door, as they certainly will do till they have Home Rule. New expressions of the old animus against "the Celt" crop up every little while; and there is in circulation a mass of literature which was designed to inoculate it; while religious fanaticism has been developed in Ulster to a degree that a century ago would have been thought impossible, and has been thence diligently spread in England and Scotland. If there is to be any escape from the deadlock, then, it must seemingly be through Englishmen learning to see, in larger numbers than of old, that the Celtophobic explanation of the trouble, the theory of Celtic incapacity, is mere barbaric absurdity; that the religious feud is something still worse; and that if Irishmen are in more constant social trouble than their neighbours, it must be either because they are not free to manage their own affairs now, or because they have been kept deplorably backward by outside interference in the past. pages.

And to prove this afresh is the object of the following

§ 2. English and Irish.

The question might be simplified if, before proceeding to examine historically "the Irish character," we meet English accounts of it (1) by the admission that it certainly exhibits faults, and (2) by the question whether Englishmen really sup

pose themselves, as a nation, to be anything like faultless. That they make some such assumption might be seriously taken for granted, if it were not that one half of the English nation, broadly speaking, is chronically denouncing the other half as unprincipled, dishonourable, treacherous, and unfit to exercise political power. According to the party of Mr Balfour and Mr Chamberlain, the party of Lord Rosebery is a traitorous faction, either incapable of sane political action or shamelessly bent on sacrificing the highest interests of the nation to the mere lust of place and power. But the very framers of this indictment urge on the very faction indicted that they ought not to give Home Rule to Irish Nationalists, because these in turn are unfit for political power. On the principles laid down, the whole "Gladstonian " party are equally unfit, and ought to have been disfranchised. It seems impossible to doubt that the general charge against the "Gladstonians" is not believed-in by those who make it. Then, if that is but a fashion of speech, is the charge against Irish character believed-in by those who make it? Perhaps the complete explanation is that Conservatives would gladly disfranchise Liberals if they could, but, not caring to venture on such a proposal, content themselves with affirming the unfitness for self-rule of the race with which they profess to keep "united” on terms of "equality"; thus expressing to its full extent their twofold temper of hostility to the alien and to the opponent.

That Irish Nationalists are "traitors," is the beginning and end of the reasoning of many English Unionists, who find their fit poets in Mr Swinburne and Mr Kipling; and it falls to be said that if we are to pronounce logically, from the Kipling point of view, on any citizen's fitness for self-government, those politicians themselves must be reckoned about as unfit as any one not under restraint can well be. They represent the spirit of civil strife at an extreme strain; being really further from true "loyalty" to the constitution than the Nationalists they vituperate. Constitutions obviously exist just because men are quarrelsome and unreasonable. Wise men would not need any; and to argue that any amount of frowardness disentitles one's neighbours to exercise fuller self-government is to be at least as froward as they are alleged to be. To say that for self-government we need great wisdom is to shew little; for when men are really wise all round they will need no government whatever. As it is, with wisdom but scantily developed in most of us, loyalty to constitutional government consists in accepting without indecent fury any turn of affairs decided on by the majority. In brief, Irishmen cannot