The Liberal Tradition

4. IRELAND

82. JOHN BRIGHT: Speech at Dublin, 30 October 1866

Now, if it were possible, would it not be worth while to change the sentiments and improve the condition of the Irish cultivators of the soil? If we were to remove the State Church, there would still be a Church, but it would not be a supremacy Church. The Catholics of Ireland have no idea of saying that Protestantism in its various forms shall not exist in their island. There would still be a Church, but it would be a free Church of a section of a free people. . . .

Who objects to this? The men who are in favour of supremacy, and the men who have a fanatical hatred of what they call Popery. To honest and good men of the Protestant Church and of the Protestant faith there is no reason whatever to fear this change. What has the voluntary system done in Scotland? What has it done amongst the Nonconformists of England? What has it done amongst the population of Wales? and what has it done amongst the Catholic population of your own Ireland? In my opinion, the abolition of the Established Church would give Protestantism itself another chance. I believe there has been in Ireland no other enemy of Protestantism so injurious as the Protestant State Establishment. . . . One effect of the Established Church has been this, the making Catholicism in Ireland not only a faith but a patriotism, for it was not likely that any member of the Catholic Church would incline in the slightest degree to Protestantism so long as it presented itself to his eyes as a wrongdoer and full of injustice in connection with the government of his country.

But if honest Protestantism has nothing to fear from the changes that I would recommend, what has the honest landowner to fear? The history of Europe and America for the last one hundred years affords scarcely any picture more painful than that which is afforded by the landowners of this kingdom. The Irish landowner has been different from every other landowner, for the bulk of his land has only been about half cultivated, and he has had to collect his rents by a process approaching the evils of civil war. His property has been very insecure—the sale of it sometimes has been rendered impossible. The landowner himself has often been hated by those who ought to have loved him. He has been banished from his ancestral home by terror, and not a few have lost their lives without the sympathy of those who ought to have been their protectors and their friends. . . .

What is the first remedy which you would propose? Clearly this—that which is the most easily applicable and which would most speedily touch the condition of the country. It is this—that the property which the tenant shall invest or create in his farm shall be secured to the tenant by law. I believe that if Parliament were fairly to enact this it would make a change in the whole temper of the country. I recollect in the year 1849 being down in the county of Wexford. I called at the house of an old farmer of the name of Stafford, who lived in a very good house, the best farmhouse, I think, that I had seen since leaving Dublin. He lived on his own farm, which he had bought fifteen years before. The house was a house which he had himself built. He was a venerable old man, and we had some very interesting conversation with him. I asked how it was he had so good a house? He said the farm was his own, and the house was his own, and, as no man could disturb him, he had made it a much better house than was common for the farmers of Ireland. I said to him, ‘If all the farmers of Ireland had the same security for the capital they laid out on their farms, what would be the result?’ The old man almost sprang out of his chair, and said, ‘Sir, if you will give us that encouragement, we will bate the hunger out of Ireland.’ It is said that all this must be left to contract between the landlord and the tenant; but the public, which may be neither landlord nor tenant, has a great interest in this question; and I maintain that the interests of the public require that Parliament should secure to the tenant the property which he has invested in his farm. But I would not stop here.

There is another, and what I should call a more permanent and far-reaching remedy for the evils of Ireland, and those persons who stickle so much for political economy I hope will follow me in this. The great evil of Ireland is this—that the Irish people—the Irish nation—are dispossessed of the soil, and what we ought to do is to provide for, and aid in, their restoration to it by all measures of justice. Why should we tolerate in Ireland the law of primogeniture? Why should we tolerate the system of entails? Why should the object of the law be to accumulate land in great masses in few hands, and to make it almost impossible for persons of small means, and tenant-farmers, to become possessors of land? If you go to other countries—for example, to Norway, to Denmark, to Holland, to Belgium, to France, to Germany, to Italy, or to the United States, you will find that in all these countries those laws of which I complain have been abolished, and the land is just as free to buy and sell, and hold and cultivate, as any other description of property in the kingdom. No doubt your Landed Estates Court and your Record of Titles Act were good measures, but they were good because they were in the direction that I want to travel farther in.

But I would go farther than that; I would deal with the question of absenteeism. I am not going to propose to tax absentees; but if my advice were taken, we should have a Parliamentary Commission empowered to buy up the large estates in Ireland belonging to the English nobility, for the purpose of selling them on easy terms to the occupiers of the farms and to the tenantry of Ireland. . . . What you want is to restore to Ireland a middle-class proprietary of the soil; and I venture to say that if these estates could be purchased and could be sold out farm by farm to the tenant occupiers in Ireland, that it would be infinitely better in a conservative sense, than that they should belong to great proprietors living out of the country.

Speeches by John Bright, M.P., ed. by J. H. T. Rogers (1868), vol. i, pp. 361-76.

83. JOHN BRIGHT: Speech in the House of Commons, 1 April 1868

The sword has scarcely ever been out of the hand of the governing power in Ireland. And if a fair, simple, and unadorned narrative were given of the transactions of this Parliament with Ireland with regard to its different enactments, coercive restrictions, suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, and so forth, it would form a narrative which would astonish the world and would discredit us. Sir, I am afraid it is not too much to say that, in support of this supremacy, many victims have perished on the scaffold in Ireland, and that the fields of Ireland have been more than once drenched with the blood of her people. But, after all this is done, we are not a bit more secure.

It is no matter what Government sits on the bench opposite. The right hon. gentleman the member for South Lancashire was there two years ago, and on that occasion, by the consent of his colleagues, the then Home Secretary had to introduce the Bill for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Now you are on that side of the House, and you have to do the same. Nobody says it is not necessary. I am not prepared to say it has not been necessary at other times. But surely if this be necessary it shows that the Union is not very secure in Ireland. In fact, Sir, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act has become so common that it causes almost no remark. The measure is introduced into the House. An Irish member makes a feeble protest against it, and it is passed, and we suspend the liberties of one of the three kingdoms from year to year. And the Prime Minister has the courage—I might almost use another word—he has the courage to say there is no crisis, and that things are going on very much as usual, and that the House of Commons is not required to do much or care much for that country.

What you have in Ireland is this. There is anarchy, which is subdued by force, and after centuries of rule, we have got no farther. We have not reconciled Ireland to us, we have done none of those things which the world says we ought to have done; and at this moment—in the year 1868—we are discussing the question whether it is possible to make any change with reference to the Established Church in Ireland which will bring about a better state of feeling between the people and the Imperial Government. Sir, I am afraid that there has been very little statesmanship and very much neglect, and I think we ought to take shame to ourselves, and try to get rid of some of our antiquated prejudices on this matter, and look at it as men whose vision is not impaired by the passionate feelings which have so often prevailed in this country with regard to this question.

Ibid. pp. 420-37.

84. W. E. GLADSTONE: Speech in the House of Commons, 8 April 1886

[Gladstone’s speech was made in introducing the First Home Rule Bill.]

It is felt on both sides of the House, unless I am much mistaken, that we have arrived at a stage in our political transactions with Ireland where two roads part, one from the other, not soon probably to meet again. . . .

We concur entirely in that conclusion, . . . and our intention is, Sir, to propose to the House of Commons that which, as we think, if happily accepted, will liberate Parliament from the restraints under which of late years it has ineffectually struggled to perform the business of the country; will restore legislation to its natural, ancient, unimpeded course; and will, above all, obtain an answer—a clear, we hope, and definite answer—to the question whether it is or is not possible to establish good and harmonious relations between Great Britain and Ireland on the footing of those free institutions to which Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen are alike unalterably attached. . .

The first point to which I would call your attention is this, that whereas exceptional legislation—legislation which introduces exceptional provisions into the law—ought itself to be in its own nature essentially and absolutely exceptional, it has become for us not exceptional, but habitual. We are like a man who, knowing that medicine may be the means of his restoration to health, endeavours to live upon medicine. Nations, no more than individuals, can find a subsistence in what was meant to be a cure. But has it been a cure? Have we attained the object which we desired, and honestly desired to attain? No, Sir, agrarian crime has become, sometimes upon a larger and sometimes upon a smaller scale, as habitual in Ireland as the legislation which has been intended to repress it. . . .

But the agrarian crime in Ireland is not so much a cause as it is a symptom. It is a symptom of a yet deeper mischief of which it is only the external manifestation. That manifestation is mainly threefold. In the first place, with certain exceptions for the case of winter juries, it is impossible to depend in Ireland upon the finding of a jury in a case of agrarian crime according to the facts as they are viewed by the Government, by the Judges, and by the public, I think, at large. That is a most serious mischief, passing down deep into the very groundwork of civil society. It is also, Sir, undoubtedly a mischief that, in cases where the extreme remedy of eviction is resorted to by the landlord, these cases of eviction, good, bad, and indifferent as to their justification, stand pretty much in one and the same discredit with the rural population of Ireland, and become, as we know, the occasion of transactions that we all deeply lament. Finally, Sir, it is not to be denied that there is great interference in Ireland with individual liberty in the shape of intimidation. . . .

The consequence of that is to weaken generally the respect for law, and the respect for contract, and that among a people who, I believe, are as capable of attaining to the very highest moral and social standard as any people on the face of the earth. . . .

Nothing has been more painful to me than to observe that, in this matter, we are not improving, but, on the contrary, we are losing ground. Since the last half-century dawned, we have been steadily engaged in extending, as well as in consolidating, free insititutions. I divide the period since the Act of Union with Ireland into two—the first from 1800 to 1832, the epoch of what is still justly called the great Reform Act; and, secondly, from 1833 to 1885. I do not know whether it has been as widely observed as I think it deserves to be that, in the first of these periods—thirty-two years—there were no less than eleven years in which our Statute Book was free throughout the whole year from repressive legislation of an exceptional kind against Ireland. But in the fifty-three years since we advanced far in the career of Liberal principles and actions—in those fifty-three years from 1833 to 1885—there were but two years which were entirely free from the action of this special legislation for Ireland. Is not that of itself almost enough to prove that we have arrived at the point where it is necessary that we should take a careful and searching survey of our position? . . .

If coercion is to be the basis for legislation, we must no longer be seeking, as we are always laudably seeking, to whittle it down almost to nothing at the very first moment we begin, but we must, like men, adopt it, hold by it, sternly enforce it, till its end has been completely attained—with what results to peace, good will, and freedom I do not now stop to enquire. Our ineffectual and spurious coercion is morally worn out. . . .

I can, indeed, conceive and in history we may point to circumstances in which coercion of that kind, stern, resolute, consistent, might be, and has been, successful. But it requires, in my judgment, two essential conditions, and these are—the autocracy of Government, and the secrecy of public transactions. With those conditions, that kind of coercion to which I am referring might possibly succeed. But will it succeed in the light of day, and can it be administered by the people of England and Scotland against the people of Ireland by the two nations which, perhaps, above all others upon earth—I need hardly except America—best understand and are most fondly attached to the essential principles of liberty? . . .

This I will say, that the people of England and Scotland will never resort to that alternative until they have tried every other. Have they tried every other? Well, some we have tried, to which I will refer. I have been concerned with some of them myself. But we have not yet tried every alternative, because there is one—not unknown to human experience—on the contrary, widely known to various countries in the world where this dark and difficult problem has been solved by the comparatively natural and simple, though not always easy, expedient of stripping law of its foreign garb, and investing it with a domestic character. I am not saying that this will succeed; I by no means beg the question at this moment; but this I will say, that Ireland, as far as I know, and speaking of the great majority of the people of Ireland, believes it will succeed, and that experience elsewhere supports that conclusion. The case of Ireland, though she is represented here not less fully than England or Scotland, is not the same as that of England or Scotland. England by her own strength, and by her vast majority in this House, makes her own laws just as independently as if she were not combined with two other countries. . . . Scotland, wisely recognized by England, has been allowed and encouraged in this House to make her own laws as freely and as effectually as if she had a representation six times as strong. The consequence is that the mainspring of law in England is felt by the people to be English; the mainspring of law in Scotland is felt by the people to be Scotch; but the mainspring of law in Ireland is not felt by the people to be Irish, and I am bound to say that it cannot be felt to be Irish in the same sense as it is English and Scotch. The net results of this statement which I have laid before the House because it was necessary as the groundwork of my argument, are these—in the first place, I admit it to be little less than a mockery to hold that the state of law and of facts conjointly, which I have endeavoured to describe, conduces to the real unity of this great, noble, and world-wide Empire. In the second place, something must be done, something is imperatively demanded from us to restore to Ireland the first conditions of civil life—the free course of law, the liberty of every individual in the exercise of every legal right, the confidence of the people in the law, and their sympathy with the law, apart from which no country can be called, in the full sense of the word, a civilized country, nor can there be given to that country the blessings which it is the object of civilized society to attain. . . .

Sir, I do not deny the general good intentions of Parliament on a variety of great and conspicuous occasions, and its desire to pass good laws for Ireland. But let me say that, in order to work out the purposes of Government, there is something more in this world occasionally required than even the passing of good laws. . . . The passing of many good laws is not enough in cases where the strong permanent instincts of the people, their distinctive marks of character, the situation and history of the country, require not only that these laws should be good, but that they should proceed from a congenial and native source, and besides being good laws should be their own laws. . . .

The principle that I am laying down I am not laying down exceptionally for Ireland. It is the very principle upon which, within my recollection, to the immense advantage of the country, we have not only altered, but revolutionized our method of governing the Colonies. I had the honour to hold office in the Colonial Department fifty-one years ago. At that time the Colonies were governed from Downing Street. It is true that some of them had Legislative Assemblies; but with these we were always in conflict. . . . All that has changed. England tried to pass good laws for the Colonies at that period; but the Colonies said—‘We do not want your good laws; we want our own.’ We admitted the reasonableness of that principle, and it is now coming home to us from across the sea. We have to consider whether it is applicable to the case of Ireland. Do not let us disguise this from ourselves. We stand face to face with what is termed Irish nationality. Irish nationality vents itself in the demand for local autonomy, or separate and complete self-government in Irish, not in Imperial, affairs. Is this an evil in itself? Is it a thing that we should view with horror or apprehension? . . . Sir, I hold that it is not. . . .

I say that the Irishman is as capable of loyalty as another man—I say that if his loyalty has been checked in its development, why is it? Because the laws by which he is governed do not present themselves to him, as they do to us in England and Scotland, with a native and congenial aspect. . . .

I ask that in our case we should practise, with firm and fearless hand—what we have so often preached—the doctrine which we have so often inculcated upon others—namely, that the concession of local self-government is not the way to sap or impair, but the way to strengthen and consolidate unity. . . . I ask that we should apply to Ireland that happy experience which we have gained in England and in Scotland, where the course of generations has now taught us, not as a dream or a theory, but as practice and as life, that the best and surest foundation we can find to build upon is the foundation afforded by the affections, the convictions, and the will of the nation.

Gladstone’s Speeches, ed. by A. Tilney Bassett (1916), pp. 602-44.

85. W. E. GLADSTONE: Speech in the House of Commons, 17 February 1888

[On 9 September 1887, on the occasion of a prosecution against William O’Brien, one of the leaders of the National League, a crowd gathered at Mitchelstown, County Cork. During the meeting there was a scuffle with the police, who opened fire. Three people were killed.]

The right hon. gentleman was especially indignant with me because in the recess I had telegraphed to some correspondent the words ‘Remember Mitchelstown.’ . . . I never in my life uttered words by letter or telegram which I more rejoice to allude to, or which I am better contented to have employed than the words ‘Remember Mitchelstown.’ . . . It was time I should say ‘Remember Mitchelstown’—particularly when Mitchelstown might have become what is called a prerogative instance. . . . I tell the right hon. gentleman frankly that I am of opinion that he has become by clear implication, and by his own deliberate act, a breaker of the law. (Cheers.) He broke the law by authoritative assent and approval bestowed upon those who had wantonly and repeatedly, and with fatal consequences, broken it. He not only did this, but he did it under circumstances where that authoritative approval, conveyed to the mind of the police, would naturally, excusably, almost necessarily, have pointed out to them that that was to be a model and the rule of their conduct. It was in the interests of law and order that I denounced conduct like this.

[Mr. Gladstone then went on to deal with certain cases in which arbitrary methods of arrest and treatment in prison had occurred.]

I wish to point out that at the moment when this gentleman, whose wife was in danger, was naturally anxious to repair to his home, a new charge was brought against him (as he was going out of the court on bail), a new sentence of a month was passed, his right of appeal was taken away, and he was prevented, not only from preparing his defence in the first case, but also from repairing to his home, where not only difficulty and pain but actual danger threatened him. Is that the sort of administration of the Act of last year which the Government are prepared to defend? Is it thus that Ireland is to be reconciled? Is it thus that the Irish nation is to be converted? Is it in this House of Commons—the most ancient and noblest of all the temples of freedom in the world—that such operations as these are to be either passed over in silence or defended? . . .

The Plan of Campaign is an interference with the law; it is, in truth, a substitute, without authority, for the law. Far be it from me to deny that, necessarily, such a Plan in the abstract is an evil. It is something more; it is a sign of deeper evils; it is a sign that the law itself is not doing its work, and that the conditions of legality do not exist; it is a warning to set about restoring them. This is not the only case where extra-legal combination and anti-legal combination have been brought into existence, sometimes with the effect, sometimes with the purpose, of mitigating social disorder. You will recollect the Swing riots, sheer and gross offences against the law in England. But these offences had the most powerful and important effects in bringing about wide, sweeping, essential reforms of the law, which without them possibly would never, probably would not at the time, have been obtained. . . . Such is the condition of man and the imperfection of institutions that sometimes things which are evils in themselves are the cure and mitigation of greater evils.

[Mr. Gladstone argued that there was no established connection between the Plan of Campaign or the National League and agrarian rise in Ireland: that, on the contrary, both were working in the interests of quiet and order, and that the Government’s plan to suppress them was not only a failure, but entirely misconceived.]

Will the Government for ever continue to deal with signs and never look at the substance? Will it for ever deal with external symptoms, and never search out the source and seat of the malady? There are many things said by the Government in debate, but there is one thing they and their supporters most rarely say. We never hear them express a confidence that they will be able to establish a permanent resistance to Home Rule. . . . I do not disguise for myself the strength of the combination that is against us. . . . They have nearly the whole of the wealth of the country; they have nearly the whole of the men of social station in the country; they have a vast preponderance in all the elements of social strength. . . . There is therefore, I do not doubt, ample power to interpose delay before this great question shall be settled. But, Sir, delay on a subject of this kind,—a controversy between nations—is no obvious or unmixed good. You are happily free at this moment from the slightest shadow of foreign complications. You have at this moment the constitutional assent of Ireland, pledged to you in the most solemn form, for the efficacy of the policy I am considering (Home Rule). The day may come when your condition may not be so happy. I do not expect, any more than I desire, these foreign complications. Still, it is unwise to shut them wholly out of view. What we have to fear is rather this, that if resistance to the national voice of Ireland be pushed too far, those who now guide the mind of the nation may gradually lose their power and be supplanted by ruder and more dangerous agencies. Nay, it may happen that these very institutions, the National League and the Plan of Campaign, which would vanish into thin air upon a rational and early settlement of the Irish question, may drive such a deep root into the soil, may acquire such a mastery, if not over the understanding, over the feelings and passions of the people, that these institutions may grow to dangerous power. It is possible that having themselves been brought, perhaps having been forced, into existence by bad government, that they may acquire a strength that will enable them hereafter to offer the most serious hindrances to government which is good. . . .

For 700 years, with Ireland practically unrepresented, with Ireland prostrate, with the forces of this great and powerful island absolutely united against her—for these 700 years you have tried and failed to do that which you are now trying to do with Ireland fully represented in your Parliament, with Ireland herself as a people raised to a position which is erect and strong, and with the mind even of England so divided that if you look to the elections of the last twelve months, the majority of the nation have voted in favour of the concession of her desires. How long is this to continue? I would venture to ask hon. gentlemen opposite, under such circumstances as these, is your persistence in this system of administration—I will not say just, because that I know you will contest, but is it wise; is it politic, is it hopeful; and above all is it conservative? Or will you not now at length bethink yourselves of change, and consent to administer and finally to legislate for Ireland as you legislate for England and Scotland, in conformity with the constitutionally expressed wishes of the profound and permanent convictions of its people, and will you thus at last consent to present to the world the blessed spectacle of a truly and not a nominally united Empire?

Coercion in Ireland, a reprint of Mr. Gladstone’s speech in the House of Commons, 17 February 1888.