Edward Spencer Beesly

“ When once John Bull has tasted the blessing of freedom from the Irish yoke, nothing will induce him to run his neck into it again.
As for the ancient parties, the certainty that they will have to get along together somehow, and settle their differences without the intervention of Lord Randolph Churchill, is the one thing needed to make them drop their weapons. Material interests will assert themselves. It is not the well-to-do people who have anything to fear. They will manage in the long run to hold their own in Ireland, as they have done everywhere else from the beginning of history ”

“ The Irish are at present masters of the situation, because we are afraid of separation and they are not, or rather think they are not. But the moment we make up our minds that it will be better for us to separate than to be governed by Ireland—which is virtually our fate now—we are in a position to offer them independence on either the colonial or federal model, subject to all such conditions as we can reasonably desire to impose. At present, Mr. Gladstone is challenged to prove that the guarantees he has devised will be of any avail against the bad faith or ill will of the Irish people. ”

“ What a blinded fanatic that man must be—I do not care whether he is a costermonger or an ex-Cabinet Minister—who can find in our nominal government of Ireland any set off against her real government of England. ”

“ Pride in the ever extending area of British territory, and the vast population subject to our rule, is a feeling confined to the well-to-do. It is a survival of military manners, and of the old belief that the material prosperity as well as the glory of any nation depended on its ability to bully its neighbours. ”

“ The re-casting of our constitution, the redistribution of taxation, the substitution of a system of education for a state church, the limitation of proprietary rights in land, poor law reform, sanitary reform, legal reform, in a word the subordination of private interests to public utility—these are questions that cannot be dealt with even by public opinion while our energies and attention are wasted on the management of two hundred millions of people who do not belong to us. ”

“ Ireland then has practically got her way already. The supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is nominally intact. Only, the Queen's writ does not run; and Mr. Chamberlain, to save appearances, will make a law that it shall not run.
But if the English yoke on Ireland has come in these days of Carnarvon and Morley to be easy, and its burden practically light, the Irish yoke on England is a reality of the sternest kind. We have a string of reforms waiting to be carried, and a huge Liberal majority of ninety-six (excluding all Irish members) prepared to carry them. ”

“ I have no doubt he sees clearly what I have endeavoured to point out, that in the well-proved absence of a determination on the part of the English people to trample out Irish patriotism by brute force, there is only one guarantee for the maintenance of the Union which is of any efficacy; and that is a readiness to throw up the Union. "He that loveth his life shall lose it, but he that hateth it shall keep it unto life eternal." Let Mr. Gladstone plant a firm foot on reality. ”

“ Is not the United Kingdom the work of the rich, and would not its dismemberment, perhaps, give the poor man his chance? That is the way in which the poor blind giant is half inclined to consider the question." Yes, my superior friend, and very soon you will find him wholly inclined to consider it in that way. You can have no idea till you come to try it, how hard it will be to make him see what he gains by lending you his strength to hold India or Ireland. ”

“ Now one of the first things the working man is likely to find out, when he comes to consider how he shall use his political influence, is that big states and empires exist mainly for the advantage of big people. ”

“ When we have Home Rule for England there will be some chance that workmen's questions will come to the front. Workmen and non-workmen will have to be brought face to face in comparatively small governmental areas if the former are to have anything like a fair chance of getting their interests attended to. Home Rule for Ireland is the first and most obviously practical step in this direction.
Mr. Chamberlain says he is against the Bill because the tendency of modern Europe is to unification rather than separation. It is a thousand pities that so able a man should be so imperfectly informed. ”

“ It may enable Her Majesty the Queen and Empress to hold her head some inches higher among the sovereigns of Europe. It may inflate an upper-class Englishman with a sense of imperial grandeur. But it is time the ordinary elector, the working man and the small tradesman, asked himself how he is a gainer by it.
"What an ignoble ideal," cries a West-End journalist, "is this that you are holding up before the workman! Are great questions of policy, on which all educated men agree, to be treated from his purely personal standpoint?" ”

“ I am addressing myself principally to our working men, and I know that after all nothing moves them so much as an appeal to their sense of justice and moral right. They do not need to be reminded of the cruel wrongs our country has inflicted on Ireland, wrongs which we only began to redress seventeen years ago. ”

“ There happens to be an important difference between the "personal stand-point" of the workman and that of the well-to-do citizen. It has been thus expressed by Auguste Comte. "The working class is not, properly speaking, a class at all, but constitutes the body of society. From it proceed the various special classes, which we may regard as organs necessary to that body." From which it follows that any political or social arrangements which are for the true and permanent advantage of the working class, are for the advantage of the community as a whole ”

“ West-End journalist, all educated men are not agreed, as you know very well. But let that pass. "Education," as you understand the word, has very little connection with political insight, and still less with true patriotism. What you mean by educated men, are people whose parents could afford to send them to schools and colleges, from which most of them brought away nothing in the way of education but a wretched smattering of dead languages and mathematics. ”

“ For such is the block of Reforms waiting for legislation that the public will not nowadays bend itself to the serious consideration of any one of them until its turn for consideration in Parliament is seen to have arrived. People will not waste their time on projects of law which may have to wait years before they can be dealt with. In the meantime, 556 members for Great Britain are kept slaving at Irish questions, great and small, in which the mass of British electors neither have nor feel the slightest interest. ”

“ The workman is quite right in his suspicion, that the bigness of our Empire is an obstacle to the improvement of his condition. He has only to look at the debates of the House of Commons from the beginning of the session to the end. He will find that when the members are not occupied with Ireland, they are busy with Egypt or Afghanistan or South Africa; anything rather than the condition of English workmen. On wars in those distant lands, millions of money are squandered with hardly a show of opposition. ”

“ When the curtain rises, and self-governing Ireland is discovered entering on her new career, it will be found that parties have sorted themselves with amazing promptitude, and after a quite unexpected fashion. ”

“ What a novel and inspiriting sensation of strength would he experience if he could meet every unreasonable demand or unfulfilled obligation with the threat, not of doing something, but of ceasing to do something. ”

“ Nothing can give peace of mind in political action but a firm resolve never to recognise as politically right what is morally wrong. Those who know that peace must from their hearts wish it to all their countrymen. ”

“ It appeals to the small but powerful class of Englishmen who own land or hold mortgages in Ireland, or whose relations do; or who, being English landlords, look on Irish landlords as an outpost of landlordism to be defended as long as possible. Our workmen have heard something of the Irish landlord, and there is no being so hateful to them. But they could hardly be expected to feel much enthusiasm for Home Rule if it really menaced the safety and welfare of their own country. ”

“ There was a time, and it is not so far distant, when in the race for bigness, any weak country did run a risk of being snapped up, merely to add to the acreage and population of a powerful neighbour. I believe that many people are so unobservant as to imagine that this danger is as great as ever. ”

“ Even during the present century the tendency has not been upon the whole towards unification. Survey Europe from north to south. Russia has swallowed Finland and Poland, but she cannot digest them. Finland has her separate national institutions, and makes steady progress towards complete Home Rule. The Polish national spirit is inextinguishable, and must sooner or later prevail. ”

“ The working classes do not yet swamp the other electors because they are handicapped by sly regulations about registration, hours of polling, and so on. But even now they weigh heavily, and the first result of their intervention is a movement for Home Rule, which is rapidly spreading from Ireland to England, Wales and Scotland. ”

“ Religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, commercial wars in the 18th, revolutionary wars in the 19th, have, it is true, driven the peoples of Europe to suspend their abiding and normal predilection for Home Rule in obedience to the exigencies of attack and defence. ”

“ They are learning that if they want their business done, they must find a man they can trust, and depute him to do it. Parliaments—yes, and cabinets—are honeycombed with personal intrigues and ignoble jealousies. ”

“ But the ascendency of industrial and pacific manners, now near at hand, will remove all inducement for a degree of concentration which sacrifices the full and healthy development of political existence. ”

“ Gladstone stood absolutely alone, that he was a lunatic or worse. Such a torrent of unscrupulous malignity has never burst on the head of any statesman in our time. The calculation was that the unparalleled violence of this concerted onslaught would prevent the Home Rule Bill from passing its first reading, that is to say, would inflict on Mr. Gladstone, not merely a defeat, but an insult ”

“ The direct, though not continuous, intervention of working men in the government of the country will be signalised by a refusal to let it be encumbered any longer with this millstone of an empire. To the working man it is of little consequence whether the Union Jack flies at Gibraltar, Quebec, and Calcutta ”

“ Translated into plain English, this means that Members of Parliament, especially some of the more prominent of them, having regard to many foolish and often insincere utterances when they were on the stump last autumn, would have preferred to make their conversion appear more gradual and spontaneous. It is not consistent with their dignity, forsooth, to face about so rapidly. ”

“ Journalist, I strongly suspect, once drew an enormous salary in India, and are still quartered on the Indian Revenue. Every fresh annexation means new prizes and promotion for officials. The working class has nothing to do with all this. ”