Читать книгу John Redmond's Last Years - Stephen Lucius Gwynn - Страница 10

The Parliament of 1892–5 was barren of results for Ireland, being consumed by factious strife, at Westminster between the Houses and in Ireland between the parties. With Gladstone's retirement it seemed as if Home Rule were dead. But thinking men realized that the Irish question was still there to be dealt with, and approach to solution began along new lines. When Lord Salisbury returned to power in 1895, Land Purchase was cautiously extended with much success: the Congested Districts Board, originally established by Mr. Arthur Balfour, was showing good results, and his brother Mr. Gerald Balfour, now Chief Secretary, felt his way towards a policy which came to be described as "killing Home Rule with kindness." A section of Irish Nationalist opinion was scared by the menace contained in this epigram; and consequently, when in 1895 Mr. Horace Plunkett (as he then was) put forward proposals for a conference of Irishmen to consider possible means for developing Irish agriculture and Irish industries under the existing system, voices were raised against what was denounced as a new attempt to divert Nationalist Ireland from its main purpose of achieving self-government. Mr. Plunkett's original proposal was that a body of four Anti-Parnellites, two Parnellites and two Unionists should meet and deliberate in Ireland, during the recess. In the upshot the Nationalist majority refused to take any part; but Redmond, with one of his supporters, Mr. William Field, served on the "Recess Committee" and concurred in its Report, out of which came the creation of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.

In 1896 the Commission on Financial Relations, which had been set up by the Liberal Ministry in 1894, reported, and its findings produced a state of feeling which for a moment promised co-operation between divided interests in Ireland. Unionist magnates joined with Nationalists in denouncing the system of taxation, which the Commission—by a majority of eleven to two—had described as oppressive and unjust to the weaker country.

Redmond was one of the members of this Commission, which included also distinguished representatives of his Nationalist opponents—Mr. Blake and Mr. Sexton; and he no doubt cherished hopes arising from the resolute demands for redress uttered by Lord Castletown and other Irish Unionist Peers. Those hopes were soon dispelled; nothing but much controversy came of the demand for improved financial relations. Mr. Gerald Balfour's schemes were more tangible, and in 1897 Redmond announced that the Government's proposal to introduce a measure of Local Government for Ireland should have his support. The Bill, when it came, exceeded expectation in its scope, and Redmond gave it a cordial welcome in the name of the Parnellites. The larger group, however, then led by Mr. Dillon, declined to be responsible for accepting it.

Later, in the working of this measure, Redmond pressed strongly that elections under it should not be conducted on party lines and that the landlord class should be brought into local administrative work. His advice unfortunately was not taken.

Then followed the South African struggle, and in giving voice to a common sentiment against what Nationalist Ireland held to be an unjust war the two Irish parties found themselves united and telling together in the lobby. Formal union followed. By this time the cleavage between Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite was less acute than that between Mr. Healy's section and the followers of Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien. The choice of Redmond as Chairman was due less to a sense of his general fitness than to despair of reaching a decision between the claims of the other three outstanding men.

The sacrifice to be made was made at Mr. Dillon's expense, and he did not acquiesce willingly or cordially. The cordiality which ultimately marked his relations with Redmond was of later growth—fostered by the necessity which Mr. Dillon found imposed on him of defending loyally the party's leader against attacks from the men who had been most active in selecting him.

A part of the compact under which Redmond was elected to the chair limited the power of the newly chosen. He was to be Chairman, not leader; that is to say, he was not to act except after consultation with the party as a whole: he was not to commit them upon policy. This meant in practice that he acted as head of a cabinet, which from 1906 onwards consisted of Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P. O'Connor—the last representing not only a great personal parliamentary experience and ability, but also the powerful and zealous organization of Irish in Great Britain. Redmond adhered scrupulously to the spirit of this compact. There was only one instance in which he took action without consultation. But that instance was the most important of all—his speech at the outbreak of the war.

Another thing which governed his conduct in the chair of the party, as indeed it governed that of nearly all the rank and file, was his horror of the years which Ireland had gone through since Parnell's fall. He loathed faction and he had struggled through murky whirlpools of it; for the rest of his life he was determined, almost at any cost, to maintain the greatest possible degree of unity among Irish Nationalists. Yet in the end he unhesitatingly made a choice and took an action which risked dividing, and in the last event actually divided, Nationalist Ireland as it had never been divided before. There were things for which he would face even that supreme peril. Deep in his heart there was a vision which compelled him. It was the vision of Ireland united as a whole.

All this, however, lay far in the future when he was elected to the chair; for the moment his task was to reunite Irish Nationalists, and it began prosperously. From the first his position was one of growing strength. Irishmen all the world over were heartsick of faction and rejoiced in even the name of unity. Redmond made it a reality. While leading the little Parnellite party, reduced at last to nine, his line of action was comparable to that pursued by Mr. William O'Brien from 1910 onwards. It had, to put things mildly, not been calculated to assist the leader of the main Nationalist body. In 1904, Justin McCarthy, then retired from politics, wrote in his book on British Political Parties: "Parnell's chief lieutenant had shown in the service of his chief an energy and passion which few of us expected of him, and was utterly unsparing in his denunciations of the men who maintained the other side of the controversy. From this it was not unnatural to expect difficulties occasioned both by the leader's temper and by the temper of those whom he led. But men who had been adverse assured me that they had changed their opinions and were glad to find they could work with Redmond in perfect harmony and that his manners and bearing showed no signs whatever of any bitter memories belonging to the days of internal dispute."

In truth, the man's nature was kindly and tolerant; courtesy came more natural to him than invective. Above all, he was sensitive for the reputation of his country in the eyes of the world, and the spectacle of Irishmen heaping vilifications on each other always filled him with distaste. Whether the taunts passed between Nationalist and Unionist or Nationalist and Nationalist made little difference to his feeling. With him it was no empty phrase that he regarded all Irishmen in equal degree as his fellow-countrymen.

In 1902 he was once more a party to a continued effort made by Irishmen outside of party lines to solve a part of the national difficulty. The policy of land purchase had proved its immense superiority over that of dual ownership and had even been introduced on a considerable scale. But its very success led to trouble, because on one side of a boundary fence there would be farmers who had purchased and whose annual instalments of purchase money were lower than the rents paid by their neighbours on the other side of the mearing. Renewed struggle against rent led to new eviction scenes on the grand scale; and by this time landlord opinion was half converted to the purchase policy, as a necessary solution. The persistency of one young Galway man, Captain John Shawe Taylor, brought about the famous Land Conference of 1902, in which Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Healy, Mr. Redmond and Mr. T.W. Russell on behalf of the tenants met Lord Dunraven, Lord Mayo, Colonel Hutcheson Poe and Colonel Nugent Everard representing (though not officially) the landlord interest: and the result of the agreement reached by this body was seen in Mr. Wyndham's Land Purchase Act of 1903. This great and drastic measure altered fundamentally the character of the Irish problem. Directly by its own effect, and indirectly by the example of new methods, it changed opinion alike in Ireland and Great Britain. In Ireland hitherto, as has been already seen, resistance to Home Rule had come primarily from the landlord class, by whom the Nationalist desire for self-government was construed as a cloak for the wish to revive or reverse the ancient confiscations. Now, the land question was by general consent settled, at least in principle; in proportion as landlords were bought out the leading economic argument against Home Rule disappeared. The opposition reduced itself strictly to political grounds; and it began to be plain that the true heart of resistance lay in Ulster.

Also, lines of cleavage in the Unionist camp began to appear. Already, landlords in the South and West had found a common ground of action with representatives of the tenants. It was felt, alike in Ireland and England, that this precedent might be developed further.

In England political opinion was much affected by the apparent success of an attempt to deal with the Irish problem piecemeal. The Congested Districts Board had done much to relieve those regions where famine was always a possibility; Local Government had given satisfactory results; and now Land Purchase was hailed as the beginning of a new era. The idea of seeing how much farther the principle of tentative approach could be carried took strong hold of many minds, and the word "devolution" came into fashion.

When it became known that Sir Antony MacDonnell, then Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, had, in consultation with Lord Dunraven, drafted a scheme for transferring parts of Irish administration to a purely Irish authority, a situation rapidly defined itself in which Ulster broke away from the more liberal elements in Irish Unionism. The Ulster group demanded and obtained the resignation of Mr. George Wyndham; they demanded also the dismissal of the Under-Secretary. But Sir Antony MacDonnell was not of a resigning temper; he had not acted without authority, and he was defended zealously by the Irish members. The section of Liberal opinion which adhered rather to Lord Rosebery than to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman probably drew the conclusion that the Irish party were prepared at least to tolerate the policy of approaching Home Rule step by step; and beyond doubt they were impressed by the prestige of Sir Antony MacDonnell's record and personality. The son of a small Irish Catholic landlord, educated at the Galway College of the Queen's University, he had entered the Indian Civil Service and in it risen to the highest point of power. The recommendation that he should be brought home to assist in the Government of Ireland had come from Lord Lansdowne, then Governor-General of India, who knew that the famous administrator of the Punjab was a Catholic Irishman of Nationalist sympathies. He had been accepted by Mr. Wyndham, his official chief, "rather as a colleague than as a subordinate." Officially and publicly, the credit for the Land Act of 1903 went to the Chief Secretary, and Mr. Wyndham deserves much of it. But no one who knew the two men could have doubted that in the shaping of a measure involving so wide a range of detail, the leading part must have been taken by the Irish Civil Servant who in India had acquired most of his fame from a sweeping measure of land reform.

Proposals to alter the method and conduct of Irish administration before touching the parliamentary power to legislate and to tax came with extraordinary weight in coming from such a man; and the history of the previous Home Rule Bills was not encouraging to anyone, especially to those who had been members of Mr. Gladstone's two last administrations. From the time of the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question had brought to Liberals nothing but embarrassment and embitterment. The enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr. Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics. The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace ruin to British prosperity; the banner of Free Trade offered a splendid rallying-point for a party which had known fifteen years of dissension and division. Prudent men thought it would be unsafe, unwise and unpatriotic to compromise this great national interest by retaining the old watch-word on which Gladstone had twice fought and twice been beaten.

It was clear, too, that a Home Rule Bill would provoke a direct conflict with the House of Lords and would raise that great struggle on not the most favourable issue. Statesmen like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith probably believed that a partial measure, an instalment of self-government, to which some influential sections of the Tory party would not be unfriendly, might have strong hopes of passing into law.

So it came to pass that in the election of 1906 the Liberal Party came into power with a majority of unexampled magnitude, but with a Government pledged, negatively, not to introduce a Home Rule Bill in that Parliament, but, positively, to attempt an Irish settlement by the policy of instalments.

In all this lay the seeds of trouble for the Irish leader. Liberals have never understood that Ireland will not take from them what it would take from the Tories. It will accept, as a palliative, from the party opposed to Home Rule what it will not accept from those who have admitted the justice of the national demand.