1795, when the French had made themselves masters of Brabant, Flanders, and Holland, the rebel government of United Irishmen was so well-established in Ireland that, as Lord Clare, the Irish Chancellor, subsequently admitted in the House of Lords, Ireland was for some weeks in a state of actual separation from Great Britain. When the great Rebellion of 1798 broke out, the French Directory sent assistance to the Irish rebels in order to facilitate the greater scheme—the conquest of England and of Europe. When we come to estimate the danger which the grant of Home Rule to Ireland would bring to the safety of England, we are faced with two considerations. In the first place, the movements of the French in the past were, as we have said, strategic. Given an Irish Parliament that was hostile to England, or at least dubious in her loyalty to this country, the movement of a hostile fleet against our communications would be as dangerous now as it was in the past.
When we try to estimate what would be the feelings of an Irish Government when England was at war, we have to consider not only the speeches of avowed enemies of the Empire like Major McBride and the Irish Americans, but we have also to remember the attitude adopted upon all questions of foreign policy by the more responsible Nationalists of the type of Mr. Dillon. Not only have the Irish Nationalist party consistently opposed every warlike operation that British Governments have found to be necessary, but they have also fervently attacked the Powers on the Continent of Europe that have been suspected of friendship to England. We have only to imagine the element of weakness and disunion which would be introduced into our foreign policy by an Irish Parliament that passed resolutions regarding the policy of the Governments, say, of Russia and of France, in order to realise the immense dangers of setting up such a Parliament when we are again confronted with a mighty Confederation of opponents in Europe. It is admitted that the next European war will be decided by the events of the first few days. In order to succeed, we shall have to strike and strike quickly. But in order that there should be swift and effective action, there should be only one Government to be consulted. The Irish Ministry that was not actively hostile, but only unsympathetic and dilatory, might, in many ways, fatally embarrass Ministers at Westminster.
Moreover, another complication has been introduced by the dependence of England upon Irish food supplies. Lord Percy points out that there are two stages in every naval war; first, the actual engagement, and then the blockade or destruction of the ships of the defeated country. He points out that, even after the destruction of the French Navy at Trafalgar, the damage done to British oversea commerce was very great. Modern conditions of warfare have made blockade an infinitely more difficult and precarious operation, and we must therefore face the certainty that hostile cruisers will escape and interfere with our oversea supplies of food. Since Ireland lies directly across our trade routes, it is probable that the majority of our food supplies will be derived from Ireland or carried through that country. But Irish Ministers would not have forgotten the lesson of the famine, when food was exported from Ireland though the people starved. Curious as it may seem, Ireland, though a great exporting country, does not under present conditions feed herself, and therefore an Irish Ministry would certainly lay in a large stock of the imported food supplies before they were brought to England, in order first of all absolutely to secure the food of their own people. It would be open for them at any time, by cutting off our supplies, our horses and our recruits, to extract any terms they liked out of the English people or bring this country to its knees. "England's difficulty" would once again become "Ireland's opportunity." The experience of 1782 would be repeated. Resistance to Ireland's demands for extended powers would bring about war between the two countries. In the striking phrase of Mr. Balfour's arresting article, "The battle of the two Parliaments would become the battle of the two peoples." It is only necessary to refer briefly to the fact that the active section of the Nationalist party has continually and consistently opposed recruiting for the British Army. It is perfectly certain that, under Home Rule, this policy would be accentuated rather than reversed. We now draw recruits from Ireland out of all proportion to its population. Under Home Rule, the difficulties of maintaining a proper standard of men and efficiency must be immensely increased.
If there were no other arguments against Home Rule, the paramount necessities of Imperial defence would demand the maintenance of the Union. But the opposition to the proposed revolution in Ireland is based not only on the considerations of Imperial safety, but also on those of national honour. The historical bases of Irish nationalism have been destroyed by the arguments summarised in this book by Mr. Fisher and Mr. Amery. It was the existence of a separate Parliament in Dublin that made Ireland, for so many centuries, alike a menace to English liberty and the victim of English reprisals. Miss A.E. Murray has pointed out[1] that experience seemed to show to British statesmen that Irish prosperity was dangerous to English liberty. It was the absence of direct authority over Ireland which made England so nervously anxious to restrict Irish resources in every direction in which they might, even indirectly, interfere with the growth of English power. Irish industries were penalised and crippled, not from any innate perversity on the part of English statesmen, or from any deliberate desire to ruin Ireland, but as a natural consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic policy of the age. The very poverty of Ireland, as expressed in the lowness of Irish wages, was a convenient and perfectly justifiable argument for exclusion. Mr. Amery shows that the Protestant settlers of Ulster were penalised even more severely than the intriguing Irish chieftains against whom they were primarily directed.
It was the consciousness of the natural result of separation that caused the Irish Parliament, upon two separate occasions, to petition for that union with England which was delayed for over a century. The action of Grattan and his supporters in wresting the impossible Constitution of 1782, from the harassed and desperate English Government, began that fatal policy of substituting political agitation for economic reform which has ever since marred the Irish Nationalist movement. John Fitzgibbon[2] pointed out in the Irish House of Commons that only two alternatives lay before his country—Separation or Union. Under Separation an Irish Parliament might be able to pursue an economic policy of its own; under Union the common economic policy of the two countries might be adjusted to the peculiar interests of each.
Pitt, undoubtedly, looked forward to a Customs Union with internal free trade as the ultimate solution of the difficulty, but a Customs Union was impossible without the fullest kind of legislative unity. It is true that the closing years of the eighteenth century were years of prosperity to certain classes and districts in Ireland, but Mr. Fisher has shown beyond dispute that this prosperity neither commenced with Grattan's Parliament nor ended with its fall. It was based upon the peculiar economic conditions which years of war and preparations for war had fostered in England; it was bound in any case to disappear with the growing concentration of industrial interests which followed the general introduction of machinery. The immediate result of the passing of the Act of Union was to increase the Irish population and Irish trade.
But to a certain extent that prosperity was fictitious and doomed to failure so soon as peace and the introduction of scientific methods of industry had caused the concentration of the great manufactures. Then came the great economic disaster for Ireland—the adoption of free trade by England. The Irish famine of 1849 was not more severe than others that had preceded it, but its evil effects were accentuated by the policy of the English Government. The economists decided that the State ought to do nothing to interfere with private enterprise in feeding the starving people, and as there was no private enterprise in the country, where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were left to die of hunger by the roadside. The lands the potato blight spared were desolated by the adoption of free trade. The exploitation of the virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands of Ireland from tillage into grass. A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil. The landlords and the farmers of Ireland were divided into two political camps, and, instead of uniting for their common welfare, each attempted to cast upon the other the burden of the economic catastrophe. To sum up in the words of Mr. Amery—
"The evils of economic Separatism, aggravated by social evils surviving from the Separatism of an earlier age, united to revive a demand for the extension and renewal
