Against Home Rule | Page 5

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