Chapter 27

For these reasons, Sir, I think the noble lord unfit for high public trust. Let us, then, consider the nature of the public trust which is now reposed in him. Are gentlemen aware that, even when he is at Calcutta, surrounded by his councillors, his single voice can carry any resolution concerning the executive administration against them all? They can object: they can protest: they can record their opinions in writing, and can require him to give in writing his reasons for persisting in his own course: but they must then submit. On the most important questions, on the question whether a war shall be declared, on the question whether a treaty shall be concluded, on the question whether the whole system of land revenue established in a great province shall be changed, his single vote weighs down the votes of all who sit at the Board with him. The right honourable Baronet opposite is a powerful minister, a more powerful minister than any that we have seen during many years. But I will venture to say that his power over the people of England is nothing when compared with the power which the Governor General possesses over the people of India. Such is Lord Ellenborough's power when he is with his council, and is to some extent held in check. But where is he now? He has given his council the slip. He is alone. He has near him no person who is entitled and bound to offer advice, asked or unasked: he asks no advice: and you cannot expect men to outstep the strict line of their official duty by obtruding advice on a superior by whom it would be ungraciously received. The danger of having a rash and flighty Governor General is sufficiently serious at the very best. But the danger of having such a Governor General up the country, eight or nine hundred miles from any person who has a right to remonstrate with him, is fearful indeed. Interests so vast, that the most sober language in which they can be described sounds hyperbolical, are entrusted to a single man; to a man who, whatever his parts may be, and they are doubtless considerable, has shown an indiscretion and temerity almost beyond belief; to a man who has been only a few months in India; to a man who takes no counsel with those who are well acquainted with India.

I cannot sit down without addressing myself to those Directors of the East India Company who are present. I exhort them to consider the heavy responsibility which rests on them. They have the power to recall Lord Ellenborough; and I trust that they will not hesitate to exercise that power. This is the advice of one who has been their servant, who has served them loyally, and who is still sincerely anxious for their credit and for the welfare of the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at least he will find persons who have a right to advise him and to expostulate with him, and who will, I doubt not, have also the spirit to do so. It is something that he will be forced to record his reasons for what he does. It is something that he will be forced to hear reasons against his propositions. It is something that a delay, though only of twenty-four hours, will be interposed between the first conception of a wild scheme and the execution. I am afraid that these checks will not be sufficient to prevent much evil: but they are not absolutely nugatory. I entreat the Directors to consider in what a position they will stand if, in consequence of their neglect, some serious calamity should befall the country which is confided to their care. I will only say, in conclusion, that, if there be any use in having a Council of India, if it be not meant that the members of Council should draw large salaries for doing nothing, if they are really appointed for the purpose of assisting and restraining the Governor, it is to the last degree absurd that their powers should be in abeyance when there is a Governor who, of all the Governors that ever England sent to the East, stands most in need both of assistance and of restraint.

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THE STATE OF IRELAND. (FEBRUARY 19, 1844) A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 19TH OF FEBRUARY 1844.

On the thirteenth of February 1844, Lord John Russell moved for a Committee of the whole House to take into consideration the state of Ireland. After a discussion of nine nights the motion was rejected by 324 votes to 225. On the fifth night of the debate the following Speech was made.

I cannot refrain, Sir, from congratulating you and the House that I did not catch your eye when I rose before. I should have been extremely sorry to have prevented any Irish member from addressing the House on a question so interesting to Ireland, but peculiarly sorry to have stood in the way of the honourable gentleman who to-night pleaded the cause of his country with so much force and eloquence. (Mr J. O'Brien.)

I am sorry to say that I cannot reconcile it to my conscience to follow the advice which has been just given me by my honourable friend the Member for Pomfret (Mr R. Milnes.), with all the authority which, as he has reminded us, belongs to his venerable youth. I cannot at all agree with him in thinking that the wisest thing that we can do is to suffer Her Majesty's Ministers to go on in their own way, seeing that the way in which they have long been going on is an exceedingly bad one. I support the motion of my noble friend for these plain reasons.

First, I hold that Ireland is in a most unsatisfactory, indeed in a most dangerous, state.

Secondly, I hold that for the state in which Ireland is Her Majesty's Ministers are in a great measure accountable, and that they have not shown, either as legislators, or as administrators, that they are capable of remedying the evils which they have caused.

Now, Sir, if I make out these two propositions, it will follow that it is the constitutional right and duty of the representatives of the nation to interfere; and I conceive that my noble friend, by moving for a Committee of the whole House, has proposed a mode of interference which is both parliamentary and convenient.

My first proposition, Sir, will scarcely be disputed. Both sides of the House are fully agreed in thinking that the condition of Ireland may well excite great anxiety and apprehension. That island, in extent about one fourth of the United Kingdom, in population more than one-fourth, superior probably in natural fertility to any area of equal size in Europe, possessed of natural facilities for trade such as can nowhere else be found in an equal extent of coast, an inexhaustible nursery of gallant soldiers, a country far more important to the prosperity, the strength, the dignity of this great empire than all our distant dependencies together, than the Canadas and the West Indies added to Southern Africa, to Australasia, to Ceylon, and to the vast dominions of the Moguls, that island, Sir, is acknowledged by all to be so ill affected and so turbulent that it must, in any estimate of our power, be not added but deducted. You admit that you govern that island, not as you govern England and Scotland, but as you govern your new conquests in Scinde; not by means of the respect which the people feel for the laws, but by means of bayonets, of artillery, of entrenched camps.

My first proposition, then, I take to be conceded. Ireland is in a dangerous state. The question which remains to be considered is, whether for the state in which Ireland is Her Majesty's Ministers are to be held accountable.

Now, Sir, I at once admit that the distempers of Ireland must in part be attributed to causes for which neither Her Majesty's present Ministers nor any public men now living can justly be held accountable. I will not trouble the House with a long dissertation on those causes. But it is necessary, I think, to take at least a rapid glance at them: and in order to do so, Sir, we must go back to a period not only anterior to the birth of the statesmen who are now arrayed against each other on the right and left of your chair, but anterior to the birth even of the great parties of which those statesmen are the leaders; anterior to the days when the names of Tory and Whig, of court party and country party, of cavalier and roundhead, came into use; anterior to the existence of those Puritans to whom the honourable Member for Shrewsbury (Mr Disraeli.), in a very ingenious speech, ascribed all the calamities of Ireland.

The primary cause is, no doubt, the manner in which Ireland became subject to the English crown. The annexation was effected by conquest, and by conquest of a peculiar kind. It was not a conquest such as we have been accustomed to see in modern Europe. It was not a conquest like that which united Artois and Franche Comte to France, or Silesia to Prussia. It was the conquest of a race by a race, such a conquest as that which established the dominion of the Spaniard over the American Indian, or of the Mahratta over the peasant of Guzerat or Tanjore. Of all forms of tyranny, I believe that the worst is that of a nation over a nation. Populations separated by seas and mountain ridges may call each other natural enemies, may wage long wars with each other, may recount with pride the victories which they have gained over each other, and point to the flags, the guns, the ships which they have won from each other. But no enmity that ever existed between such populations approaches in bitterness the mutual enmity felt by populations which are locally intermingled, but which have never morally and politically amalgamated; and such were the Englishry and the Irishry. Yet it might have been hoped that the lapse of time and the progress of civilisation would have effaced the distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed. Our island had suffered cruelly from the same evil. Here the Saxon had trampled on the Celt, the Dane on the Saxon, the Norman on Celt, Saxon, and Dane. Yet in the course of ages all the four races had been fused together to form the great English people. A similar fusion would probably have taken place in Ireland, but for the Reformation. The English settlers adopted the Protestant doctrines which were received in England. The Aborigines alone, among all the nations of the north of Europe, adhered to the ancient faith. Thus the line of demarcation between the two populations was deepened and widened. The old enmity was reinforced by a new enmity stronger still. Then came those events to which the honourable Member for Shrewsbury referred. The spirit of liberty in England was closely allied with the spirit of Puritanism, and was mortally hostile to the Papacy. Such men as Hampden, Vane, Milton, Locke, though zealous generally for civil and spiritual freedom, yet held that the Roman Catholic worship had no claim to toleration. On the other hand, all the four kings of the House of Stuart showed far more favour to Roman Catholics than to any class of Protestant nonconformists. James the First at one time had some hopes of effecting a reconciliation with the Vatican. Charles the First entered into secret engagements to grant an indulgence to Roman Catholics. Charles the Second was a concealed Roman Catholic. James the Second was an avowed Roman Catholic. Consequently, through the whole of the seventeenth century, the freedom of Ireland and the slavery of England meant the same thing. The watchwords, the badges, the names, the places, the days, which in the mind of an Englishman were associated with deliverance, prosperity, national dignity, were in the mind of an Irishman associated with bondage, ruin, and degradation. The memory of William the Third, the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, are instances. I was much struck by a circumstance which occurred on a day which I have every reason to remember with gratitude and pride, the day on which I had the high honour of being declared one of the first two members for the great borough of Leeds. My chair was covered with orange ribands. The horses which drew it could hardly be seen for the profusion of orange-coloured finery with which they were adorned. Orange cockades were in all the hats; orange favours at all the windows. And my supporters, I need not say, were men who had, like myself, been zealous for Catholic emancipation. I could not help remarking that the badge seemed rather incongruous. But I was told that the friends of Catholic emancipation in Yorkshire had always rallied under the orange banner, that orange was the colour of Sir George Savile, who brought in that bill which caused the No Popery riots of 1780, and that the very chair in which I sate was the chair in which Lord Milton, now Earl Fitzwilliam, had triumphed after the great victory which he won in 1807 over the No Popery party, then headed by the house of Harewood. I thought how different an effect that procession would have produced at Limerick or Cork, with what howls of rage and hatred the Roman Catholic population of those cities would have pursued that orange flag which, to every Roman Catholic in Yorkshire, was the memorial of contests maintained in favour of his own dearest rights. This circumstance, however slight, well illustrates the singular contrast between the history of England and the history of Ireland.

Well, Sir, twice during the seventeenth century the Irish rose up against the English colony. Twice they were completely put down; and twice they were severely chastised. The first rebellion was crushed by Oliver Cromwell; the second by William the Third. Those great men did not use their victory exactly in the same way. The policy of Cromwell was wise, and strong, and straightforward, and cruel. It was comprised in one word, which, as Clarendon tells us, was often in the mouths of the Englishry of that time. That word was extirpation. The object of Cromwell was to make Ireland thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. If he had lived twenty years longer he might perhaps have accomplished that work: but he died while it was incomplete; and it died with him. The policy of William, or to speak more correctly, of those whose inclinations William was under the necessity of consulting, was less able, less energetic, and, though more humane in seeming, perhaps not more humane in reality. Extirpation was not attempted. The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful, to replenish the earth: but they were doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York. Every man of the subject caste was strictly excluded from public trust. Take what path he might in life, he was crossed at every step by some vexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive that he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspired to be powerful and honoured, he must begin by being an exile. If he pined for military glory, he might gain a cross or perhaps a Marshal's staff in the armies of France or Austria. If his vocation was to politics, he might distinguish himself in the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he was a mere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. The statute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish to the Roman Catholics but too good a ground for recriminating on us when we talk of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner; and the harshness of those odious laws was aggravated by a more odious administration. For, bad as the legislators were, the magistrates were worse still. In those evil times originated that most unhappy hostility between landlord and tenant, which is one of the peculiar curses of Ireland. Oppression and turbulence reciprocally generated each other. The combination of rustic tyrants was resisted by gangs of rustic banditti. Courts of law and juries existed only for the benefit of the dominant sect. Those priests who were revered by millions as their natural advisers and guardians, as the only authorised expositors of Christian truth, as the only authorised dispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by the squires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-natured man would treat the vilest beggar. In this manner a century passed away. Then came the French Revolution and the great awakening of the mind of Europe. It would have been wonderful indeed if, when the happiest and most tranquil nations were agitated by vague discontents and vague hopes, Ireland had remained at rest. Jacobinism, it is true, was not a very natural ally of the Roman Catholic religion. But common enmities produce strange coalitions; and a strange coalition was formed. There was a third great rising of the aboriginal population of the island against English and Protestant ascendency. That rising was put down by the sword; and it became the duty of those who were at the head of affairs to consider how the victory should be used.

I shall not be suspected of being partial to the memory of Mr Pitt. But I cannot refuse to him the praise both of wisdom and of humanity, when I compare the plan which he formed in that hour of triumph with the plans of those English rulers who had before him governed Ireland. Of Mr Pitt's plan the Union was a part, an excellent and an essential part indeed, but still only a part. We shall do great injustice both to his head and to his heart, if we forget that he was permitted to carry into effect only some unconnected portions of a comprehensive and well-concerted scheme. He wished to blend, not only the parliaments, but the nations, and to make the two islands one in interest and affection. With that view the Roman Catholic disabilities were to be removed: the Roman Catholic priests were to be placed in a comfortable and honourable position; and measures were to be taken for the purpose of giving to Roman Catholics the benefits of liberal education. In truth, Mr Pitt's opinions on those subjects had, to a great extent, been derived from a mind even more powerful and capacious than his own, from the mind of Mr Burke. If the authority of these two great men had prevailed, I believe that the Union with Ireland would now have been as secure, and as much beyond the reach of agitation, as the Union with Scotland. The Parliament in College Green would have been remembered as what it was, the most tyrannical, the most venal, the most unprincipled assembly that ever sate on the face of this earth. I do not think that, by saying this, I can give offence to any gentleman from Ireland, however zealous for Repeal he may be: for I only repeat the language of Wolfe Tone. Wolfe Tone said that he had seen more deliberative assemblies than most men; that he had seen the English Parliament, the American Congress, the French Council of Elders and Council of Five Hundred, the Batavian Convention; but that he had nowhere found anything like the baseness and impudence of the scoundrels, as he called them, at Dublin. If Mr Pitt's whole plan had been carried into execution, that infamous parliament, that scandal to the name of parliament, would have perished unregretted; and the last day of its existence would have been remembered by the Roman Catholics of Ireland as the first day of their civil and religious liberty. The great boon which he would have conferred on them would have been gratefully received, because it could not have been ascribed to fear, because it would have been a boon bestowed by the powerful on the weak, by the victor on the vanquished. Unhappily, of all his projects for the benefit of Ireland the Union alone was carried into effect; and therefore that Union was an Union only in name. The Irish found that they had parted with at least the name and show of independence, and that for this sacrifice of national pride they were to receive no compensation. The Union, which ought to have been associated in their minds with freedom and justice, was associated only with disappointed hopes and forfeited pledges. Yet it was not even then too late. It was not too late in 1813. It was not too late in 1821. It was not too late in 1825. Yes: if, even in 1825, some men who then were, as they now are, high in the service of the crown, could have made up their minds to do what they were forced to do four years later, that great work of conciliation which Mr Pitt had meditated might have been accomplished. The machinery of agitation was not yet fully organized: the Government was under no strong pressure; and therefore concession might still have been received with thankfulness. That opportunity was suffered to escape; and it never returned.

In 1829, at length, concessions were made, were made largely, were made without the conditions which Mr Pitt would undoubtedly have demanded, and to which, if demanded by Mr Pitt, the whole body of Roman Catholics would have eagerly assented. But those concessions were made reluctantly, made ungraciously, made under duress, made from the mere dread of civil war. How then was it possible that they should produce contentment and repose? What could be the effect of that sudden and profuse liberality following that long and obstinate resistance to the most reasonable demands, except to teach the Irishman that he could obtain redress only by turbulence? Could he forget that he had been, during eight and twenty years, supplicating Parliament for justice, urging those unanswerable arguments which prove that the rights of conscience ought to be held sacred, claiming the performance of promises made by ministers and princes, and that he had supplicated, argued, claimed the performance of promises in vain? Could he forget that two generations of the most profound thinkers, the most brilliant wits, the most eloquent orators, had written and spoken for him in vain? Could he forget that the greatest statesman who took his part had paid dear for their generosity? Mr Pitt endeavoured to redeem his pledge; and he was driven from office. Lord Grey and Lord Grenville endeavoured to do but a very small part of what Mr Pitt had thought right and expedient; and they were driven from office. Mr Canning took the same side; and his reward was to be worried to death by the party of which he was the brightest ornament. At length, when he was gone, the Roman Catholics began to look, not to cabinets and parliaments, but to themselves. They displayed a formidable array of physical force, and yet kept within, just within, the limits of the law. The consequence was that, in two years, more than any prudent friend had ventured to demand for them was granted to them by their enemies. Yes; within two years after Mr Canning had been laid in the transept near us, all that he would have done, and more than he could have done, was done by his persecutors. How was it possible that the whole Roman Catholic population of Ireland should not take up the notion that from England, or at least from the party which then governed and which now governs England, nothing is to be got by reason, by entreaty, by patient endurance, but everything by intimidation? That tardy repentance deserved no gratitude, and obtained none. The whole machinery of agitation was complete and in perfect order. The leaders had tasted the pleasures of popularity; the multitude had tasted the pleasures of excitement. Both the demagogue and his audience felt a craving for the daily stimulant. Grievances enough remained, God knows, to serve as pretexts for agitation: and the whole conduct of the Government had led the sufferers to believe that by agitation alone could any grievance be removed.