HIBERNIA IRREDENTA.

1.-MR. LECKY AND IRISH AFFAIRS.

THE election of Mr. Lecky to the representation in Parliament of the University of Dublin is a matter of considerable political significance. The constituency is undoubtedly the most Unionist in the Empire. Out of an electorate of 4,506, only 57 votes were, at the General Election of 1886, cast in favour of a Home Rule candidate. It has been stated that about 60 per cent. of the Electorate are ministers in Holy Orders in the Anglican Communion of England or Ireland. Mr. Lecky's orthodoxy was, during the contest, gravely impugned. He refused, however, with great dignity and self-restraint to submit himself to any religious test, or to make any declaration of his personal views on theological subjects. "I am a member of the Irish Protestant Church," he said in effect. "I have never severed my connection with that Church. My works have been published for years and are ready to your hands. I would rather lose the election than make any confession of faith, and in this course I am adopting the attitude uniformly assumed for many years past by Parliamentary candidates." In spite of this declaration, an analysis of Mr. Lecky's Parliamentary Committee, furnished by his friends to the papers, disclosed the fact, that among the members of that body were 5 Bishops, 13 Deans, 15 Archdeacons, 3 Chancellors of Dioceses, 30 Canons of the Church of England or Ireland, 48 Doctors or Bachelors of Divinity, 28 Fellows, and 14 Professors in the University of Dublin.1

Mr. Lecky had, however, in addition to the prejudice which was excited against his supposed views on religious matters, another strongly antagonistic element with which to contend in this contest. Since the Irish Union, exclusive of Mr. Lecky himself, there have been nineteen members of Parliament from Dublin University. Of these nineteen all save one have been placemen and Irish barristers, and fifteen have been Law Officers of the Crown. The Bar of Ireland, which has long considered the representation of Trinity College to be a perquisite of their profession, put forth all their energies to secure the return of Mr. George Wright, Q.C., one of their number, a gentleman deservedly popular with his brethren, and greatly esteemed by the Irish Conservative public. Mr. Lecky vanquished all opposition from every quarter on the grounds of his European reputation as an historian, and his pre-eminent services to

(1) After the publication of this analysis, yet another prelate joined Mr. Lecky's Committee, the Right Rev. Dr. Day, Bishop of Cashel, the first Bishop appointed by popular selection after the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and a revered leader of the Evangelical Party.

the cause of the Union. His advocates boldly said that University representation was on its trial; that Mr. Lecky's defeat would pave the way for the disfranchisement of the Universities, and that a blow would be struck at the maintenance of the Union by the rejection, in an overwhelmingly Unionist constituency, of one of the foremost advocates of the present Parliamentary relations between England and Ireland. It may, under these circumstances, be of interest to indicate some striking divergences of opinion on burning questions relative to Irish affairs between Mr. Lecky and the ordinary upholders of the Union. These divergences may be almost indefinitely supplemented. I will, however, take five leading points of difference between Mr. Lecky and the Unionist Party, not taking them in their chronological order, but rather in the scale of their relative political importance. I. The character of the Irish Parliament. II. Irish opinion on the Union. III. The Rebellion of 1641. IV. The Irish Catholic Parliament of 1688. V. The Rebellion of 1798.

I. The character of the Irish Parliament.-The charges of religious intolerance, selfishness, cowardice, and corruption brought by Unionist speakers and writers against the memory of the old Irish Parliament are well known. On this heading Mr. Lecky himself has invited a comparison between his own judgment and that of the rank and file of the Unionist Party. In a letter written to The Times in January, 1886, which has been republished during the recent University contest, Mr. Lecky says:

"Those who have done me the honour to read what I have written on Irish history are aware that I am far from taking the wholly unfavourable view of the Irish Parliament in the 18th century which is common in England."

Mr. Lecky, in a purely philosophical work, Rationalism in Europe, gives the following appreciation of the Irish Parliament, which he has, so far as I am aware, in no degree modified in his subsequent writings:

"Whatever may be thought of the purity of the Irish Parliament during the brief period in which it exercised an independent authority, there are certainly few things more absurd than the charges of bigotry that are frequently directed against it. If we measure it by the standard of the present day it will, of course, appear very defective, but if we compare it with contemporary legislatures, and above all, if we estimate the peculiar temptations to which it was exposed, our verdict would be very different. It would be scarcely possible to conceive a legislature with greater inducements to adopt a sectarian policy. Before 1793 it was elected exclusively by Protestants. The Government had created, and most sedulously maintained, that close borough system which has always a tendency to make private interests the guiding motive of policy, and the extraordinary monopoly the Protestants possessed of almost all positions of wealth and dignity rendered the strictest Toryism their obvious interest. There was scarcely any public opinion existing in Ireland, and the Catholics were so torpid through continued oppression that they could exercise scarcely any influence upon legislation. Under these circumstances, the Irish Parliament having admitted them to the magistracy, to the jury-box, and to several minor privi

leges, at last accorded them the elective franchise, which in a country where they formed an immense majority of the nation, and where every reform of Parliament and every extension of education must have strengthened their interest, necessarily implied a complete emancipation. It is worthy, too, of notice that the Liberalism of the Irish Parliament was always in direct proportion to its political independence. It was when the events of the American War had infused into it that strong national feeling which produced the declaration of independence in 1782 that the tendency towards toleration became manifest. Almost all those great orators who cast a halo of such immortal eloquence around its closing period were the advocates of (Catholic) Emancipation. Almost all who were enemies of its legislative independence were the enemies of toleration.

"The Irish Parliament was, in truth, a body governed very constantly by corrupt motives, though probably not more so than the English Parliaments in the time of Walpole." . . "It was, during the period of its independence, probably more free from religious bigotry than any other representative body that had ever sat in the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament directed a deadly blow against the Tory theory by endowing the College of Maynooth, a distinctively Catholic institution designed for the education of the Catholic priesthood. The Union was on the whole very unfavourable to the movement (for Catholic Emancipation).”—(History of Rationalism in Europe, II., pp. 121-124.)

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II. Irish Opinion on the Union.-The contrast between Mr. Lecky's conclusions on this subject, and the views of the ordinary Unionist politician, was rendered very poignant some years ago. Sir William Harcourt, in a speech delivered at Salisbury on October 4th, 1889, stated that "every honest man in Ireland was opposed to the Union at the time of its enactment." This statement was severely criticised in a loading article in The Times, which stated that if Sir William Harcourt had" any hearers possessing knowledge and intellectual self-respect, a statement of this character must have made their gorge rise.' The article maintained that "the better half of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the professional classes in Ireland were in favour of that measure.' "I will maintain," said Sir William Harcourt, in a letter in reply to The Times, which appeared in that paper on October 8th, 1889, “I will maintain my proposition by testimony to which you shall have no reason to demur. Of all recent writers upon Irish affairs, and especially on the history of Ireland for the last two centuries, there is none who appears to me more full, more trustworthy, or more satisfactory than Mr. Lecky. He is, I believe, a pronounced Unionist, and therefore you will not decline his testimony on the subject of the Union. The following extracts are taken from his book, entitled, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, republished in 1871. The whole of it is extremely well worth reading, and, Unionist as Mr. Lecky is, it is the best text book of Home Rule with which I am acquainted." Sir William Harcourt then cites several passages from Mr. Lecky's Leaders of Public Opinion to prove the correctness of his estimate of the character of Irish opinion at the time of the Union upon that measure. I will confine myself to the more striking paragraphs.

"It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was opposed to the Union."... "It was certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the overwhelming majority of the people of Ireland were opposed to the destruction of their national Parliament." ... "The conduct of the Irish lawyers at this time was on the whole eminently noble. In spite of the lavish corruption of the Ministers the great body remained firm to the anti-Ministerial side, and both in public meetings and in Parliament they were the most ardent opponents of the Union. Nor does there, in this respect, appear to have been any very considerable difference between Whigs and Tories or between Protestants and Catholics. When the measure was first propounded a great meeting was held under the presidency of Saurin, one of the ablest of the Tory lawyers, and was attended by all the leading lawyers of all sides, and at this meeting a resolution condemning the proposed Union was carried by 166 to 32. At the end of 1803 there were only five members of the minority who had not received appointments from the Government.”—(Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, pp. 166-169.)

Again :

The majority of the landlord class, in whose hands the county representation remained, were strongly opposed to the Union, and Castlereagh, in 1799, complained bitterly of the warmth of the country gentlemen, who spoke in great numbers, and with much energy, against the question'; but the county seats were immensely outnumbered by the boroughs, and to purchase these was soon found to be necessary." ... "A million and a quarter of money was expended in this manner."... "By these means the majority was formed which sold the constitution of Ireland."—(Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, pp. 178-180.)

Mr. Lecky thus speaks of the disgrace and infamy which attaches to the authors of the Union, the defence of whose characters he regards as discreditable to English political literature :—

"In the case of Ireland, as truly as in the case of Poland, a national constitution was destroyed by a foreign Power, contrary to the wishes of the people. In the one case the deed was a crime of violence, in the other it was a crime of treachery and corruption; in both cases a legacy of enduring bitterness was the result. There are, indeed, few things more discreditable to English political literature than the tone of palliation, or even of eulogy, which is usually adopted towards the authors of this transaction. Scarcely any element or aggravation of political immorality was wanting, and the term honour, if it be applied to such men as Castlereagh or Pitt, ceases to have any real meaning in politics. Whatever may be thought of the abstract merits of the arrangement, the Union as it was carried was a crime of the deepest turpitude--a crime which, by imposing with every circumstance of infamy a new form of Government on a reluctant and protesting nation, has vitiated the whole course of Irish opinion."

III. The Irish Rebellion of 1641.-No episode has done such signal service to the cause of the Union on English platforms, as "The Massacre of 1641," which has been invariably cited for the purpose of provoking religious and racial hatred. Here is the ordinary Unionist method of representing this transaction, taken from a leaflet which was issued in the interest of one of the successful candidates for the Hyde Division of Cheshire in the General Election of 1886 :

“Question.-Have the Irish ever had Home Rule, and how did they behave? "Answer.—They murdered every Englishman and Protestant they could lay hands on in 1641. They were set on by the priests, who said that Protestants

were devils and served the devil, and that the killing of them was a meritorious act. Altogether they killed in that year 150,000 Protestants, men, women, and children."

Mr. Lecky is, on this issue, even more wholly at variance with the thoughtlessly accepted creed of the ordinary Unionist politician.

"It has been asserted [he says] by various writers, and is still generally believed, that the Ulster rebellion began with a general and indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants who were living without suspicion among the Catholics, resembling the massacre of the Danes by the English, the massacre of the French in the Sicilian Vespers, or the massacre of the Huguenots at St. Bartholomew. Clarendon has asserted that there were 40,000 or 50,000 of the English Protestants murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger or could provide for their defence,' and other writers have estimated the victims within the first two months of the rebellion at 150,000, at 200,000, and even at 300,000. It may be boldly stated that this statement of a sudden surprise, immediately followed by a general and organized massacre, is utterly and absolutely untrue. As is almost always the case in a great popular rising, there were, in the first outbreak of the rebellion, some murders, but they were very few, and there was at this time nothing whatever of the nature of a massacre."(History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., p. 128.)

Mr. Lecky thus sums up his very careful, thorough, and majestically impartial investigation of this incident in Irish history. The Mr. Warner whose authority Mr. Lecky cites, was a clergyman, a Fellow of Trinity College, and so decided a Protestant, that he strongly censured the liberty accorded to Catholics under Charles I., and intimated very clearly his disapproval of those tolerations of the Penal Code which had taken place in his own day. He was, however, Mr. Lecky thinks, a very honest, moderate, and painstaking writer.

"I shall be content [says Mr. Lecky] if I have conveyed to the reader my own firm conviction that the common assertion that the Rebellion of 1641 began with a general massacre of Protestants is entirely untrue, although in the course of the long and savage struggle that ensued great numbers of Englishmen were undoubtedly murdered. The number of victims, however, though very great, has been enormously and often deliberately exaggerated. The horrors of the struggle were much less exceptional than has been supposed. The worst crimes were the unpremeditated and isolated acts of a half-savage population, and it is very far from clear upon which side the balance of cruelty rests. 'The truth is,' as Warner truly says, the soldiers and common people were very savage on both sides,' and nothing can be more scandalously disingenuous than the method of these writers who have employed themselves in elaborating ghastly pictures of the crimes that were committed on one side, while they have, at the same time, systematically concealed those that were committed on the other. From the very beginning the English Parliament did the utmost in its power to give the contest the character of a war of extermination. One of its first acts was to vote that no toleration of the Romish religion should be henceforth permitted in Ireland, and it thus at once extended the range of the Rebellion and gave it the character of a war of religion."-(History of England in the Eighteenth Gentury, II., p. 155.)