they must be controlled by the State and not by County authorities. Of course, the resources of the existing Unions are much too limited to undertake such sweeping reforms, and the county must be substituted for the Union as the area of charge. The establishment of the Public Assistance authority will relieve us from the greatest scandal which now mars the administration of the Poor Law reform in Ireland—the corrupt appointment of officers in the Poor Law medical service. If we cannot have a State medical service, we can at all events ensure that appointments under the Poor Law shall be placed in incorruptible hands.
It is not to be assumed that this short sketch of policy is exhaustive, or that it touches even in outline upon all that the Unionist Party might fairly hope to do in Ireland. It is designed to show only that financially and politically, every step which can be taken to relieve the poverty and oppression which has too long continued in Ireland must be taken by a Unionist Parliament and a Government pledged to secure the administration of law and order in Ireland.
I desire on behalf of the Committee under whose auspices this work has been prepared to thank Mr. S. Rosenbaum for the ability and zeal he has shown in editing the book and in preparing it for publication. I wish also to acknowledge my personal debt to Mr. G. Locker Lampson, M.P., who, as Vice-Chairman of the Committee, has shown so much zeal and assiduity in connection with this important work.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Commercial Relations Between England and Ireland." By Miss A.E. Murray (P.S. King & Sons).
[2] Attorney General in the Irish Parliament, and later Earl of Clare.
HISTORICAL
I
A NOTE ON HOME RULE
BY THE RIGHT HON. A.J. BALFOUR, M.P.
The greater part of the present volume is devoted to showing why this country should not adopt Home Rule; but it is perhaps worth while for the ordinary British citizen to ask himself a preliminary question, namely, why he should be pressed even to consider it. That the establishment of an Irish Parliament must involve doubtful and far-reaching consequences is denied by no one. What then is the primâ facie case which has induced many Englishmen and Scotchmen to think that it ought to be seriously debated? If we could erase the past and approach the problem of framing representative institutions in their most practicable shape for the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, who would think it wise to crowd into these small Islands two, or, as some would have it, three, four, or five separate Parliaments, with their separate elections, their separate sets of ministers and Offices, their separate party systems, their divergent policies? Distances are, under modern conditions, so small, our population is so compact, the interests of its component parts are so intimately fused together, that any device at all resembling Home Rule would seem at the best cumbersome, costly, and ineffective; at the worst, perilous to the rights of minorities, the peace of the country, and the unity of the Kingdom. If, then, these common-sense considerations are thrust on one side by so many well-meaning persons, it must surely be because they think that for the destruction of our existing system there is to be found a compelling justification in the history of the past:
I am well aware that many of the persons of whom I am thinking profess to base their approval of Home Rule on purely administrative grounds. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, they say, is overweighted; it has more to do than it can manage; we must diminish its excessive burdens; and we can only do so by throwing them in part upon other and subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be admitted to the Imperial Parliament, would give Ireland privileges and powers denied to England and Scotland, and, if they are to be excluded from the Imperial Parliament, would deprive Ireland of rights which surely she ought to possess?
Again, if the "administrative" argument was really more than an ornament of debate, would any one select Ireland as the administrative district in which to make trial of the new system? Would any one, in his desire to relieve the Imperial Parliament of some of its functions, select as an area of self-government a region where one part is divided against another by passions, and, if you will, by prejudices, more violent, and more deeply-rooted than those which afflict any other fraction of the United Kingdom, choose that other fraction where, and how, you will?
I take it, then, as certain that in the mind of the ordinary British Home Ruler the justification for Home Rule is not administrative but historical. He pictures Ireland before the English invasion as an organised and independent State, happy in the possession of a native polity which Englishmen have ruthlessly destroyed, now suffering under laws and institutions forced upon her by the conquerors, suitable it may be to men of Anglo-Saxon descent, but utterly alien to the genius and temper of a Celtic population. To him, therefore, Home Rule presents itself as an act of National restitution.
Personally, I believe this to be a complete misreading of history. It is not denied—at least I do not deny—that both the English and British Governments, in their dealings with Ireland have done many things that were stupid, and some things that were abominable. But among their follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such State as I have described; for no such State existed. They did not uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another. The Ireland with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation, and when controversialists talk of "restoring" this or that institution to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be "restored" are in their origin importations from England.
This does not, of course, mean that the English were a superior race dealing with an inferior one. Indeed, there is, in my view, no sharp division of race at all. In the veins of the inhabitants of these Islands runs more than one strain of blood. The English are not simply Teutonic—still less are the Irish Celtic. We must conceive the pre-historic inhabitants both of Britain and of Ireland as subject to repeated waves of invasion from the wandering peoples of the Continent. The Celt preceded the Teuton; and in certain regions his language still survives. The Teuton followed him in (as I suppose) far greater numbers, and his language has become that of a large fraction of the civilised world. But in no part of the United Kingdom is the Teutonic strain free from either the Celtic or pre-Celtic strain; nor do I believe that the Celtic strain has anywhere a predominance such as that which, speaking very roughly, the Teutonic strain possesses in the East of these Islands, or the pre-Celtic strain in the West.
There is, therefore, no race frontier to be considered, still less is there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty, historically considered, arises in the main from
