Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches - Volume 4 by Thomas Badington Macaulay (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

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.

...


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