Home Rule Bill

“ It is clear that if the Irish Home Rule Bill is simply the first stage in a process which will lead to the creation of Home Rule Parliaments for local affairs in Scotland, England and Wales, then such slight control as the 42 Irish members may retain over British affairs will be only temporary. ”

“ A small farmer from the outlying district thought that rents would be lowered, that money would be advanced to struggling tenants, that great public works would be instituted, and plainly intimated that all these good things and many more had been roundly promised by the Home Rule leaders, and that he, for one, fully believed that all would duly come to pass, once the Bill were carried, which happy event he never expected to see. ”

“ The English Home Rulers say the opposition will end in smoke. It is said that the most insane are sometimes wiser than they dream, just as liars sometimes speak truth by accident. The movement will end in smoke, but it will be the smoke of battle. Every man who supports the Home Rule Bill incurs the stigma of blood-guiltiness. The bill that succeeds Home Rule will be the Butchers' Bill. No doubt Mr. Gladstone will explain away the "painful occurrences which we all deplore," and will endeavour to transfer the blame to other shoulders. ”

“ So much for the spirit in which we should approach the problem, and I pass to the consideration of the problem itself. What is to be the framework of Home Rule? I take it for granted that there must, in the broad sense, be responsible government, that is to say, an Irish Legislature, with an Irish Cabinet responsible to that Legislature, and, through the Lord-Lieutenant, to the Crown. So much is common ground with nearly all advocates of Home Rule, for I take it that there is no question of reverting to anything in the nature of the abortive Irish Council Bill of 1907. ”

“ The writer speaks of their "disastrous fatuity in consuming the whole of this session of the Imperial Parliament, and the greater part of one or two more, over a Home Rule Bill which will settle nothing, no, not even for three years." Disastrous fatuity is a good phrase, an excellent good phrase, in sooth. ”

“ Plain men outside the walls of Parliament can assure our representatives, that the world would bear with infinite calmness the imposition of stringent restrictions on the overflow of Parliamentary eloquence. If even the great debate on Home Rule had been finished say in a week, the outer world would have been well pleased; and measures such as the Government of Ireland Bill happily do not come before Parliament every year. The more subtle evils arising in part at least from the presence of the Irish members must be met by more searching remedies. ”

“ Poverty is to be at once and for ever abolished. "The millions an' millions that John Bull dhrags out iv us, to kape up his grandeur, an' to pay soldiers to grind us down, we'll put into our own pockets, av you plaze," was the answer vouchsafed to an inquiry as to what advantages were expected from the passing of the Home Rule Bill. The speaker was a political barber. Another of the craft said, in answer to the same query, "Well, Sorr, I think we have a right to our indipindence. ”

“ Many Unionists are to be found in the same breath prophesying Catholic tyranny under Home Rule and averring without any evidence that clerical influence caused the repudiation in 1907 of the Council Bill, because it placed education under a semi-popular body. ”

“ Great care and labour were devoted to the framing of the new Bill, and I was in constant touch throughout with members of the Recess Committee. It contained clauses dealing with urban as well as rural industries, but these lie outside my present subject, and I shall not refer to them further here. On the side of rural development the Bill embodied a novel experiment in the art of government—novel at all events in British or Irish experience, though something like it had already been tried with conspicuous success in various countries on the Continent. ”

“ The policy of Home Rule is wise in itself, and worthy the statesmanship of a nation always bold in the hour of need, and, as experience of its working is gained, it will commend itself more and more to the commonsense of a practical people, but the immediate success of the first Home Rule Act will depend greatly on the skill and wisdom with which the details of a complicated measure are devised, facing fairly the financial [pg 113] evils consequent on Tory obstinacy, and avoiding, in reasonable degree, offence to popular prejudice and existing interests. ”

“ If, then, these common-sense considerations are thrust on one side by so many well-meaning persons, it must surely be because they think that for the destruction of our existing system there is to be found a compelling justification in the history of the past:
I am well aware that many of the persons of whom I am thinking profess to base their approval of Home Rule on purely administrative grounds. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, they say, is overweighted; it has more to do than it can manage ”

“ We are face to face no longer with a highly speculative, but with a vividly practical problem, raising legislative and administrative questions of enormous practical importance, and next year we shall be dealing with this problem in an atmosphere of genuine reality totally unlike that of 1886, when Home Rule was a startling novelty to the British electorate, or of 1893, when the shadow of impending defeat clouded debate and weakened counsel. ”

“ The change of national opinion has, I believe, been considerable; but the circumstances remain ominous for the dispassionate discussion of the Irish Constitution. Patriotic people can only do their best to ensure that the grant of Home Rule shall not be nullified by restrictions and limitations which, if they are designed merely to appease opposition, are destined to create friction and discontent. ”

“ Whether we can get it or not, whether we desire it or not, and whether there is not something more desirable, are different questions. All I have to show is that the Congress gave us a fore-taste of Home Rule. ”

“ Under any system of limited Home Rule questions would arise which would afford much the same sort of justification for the employment of such methods, and they could hardly be worse for the welfare of the country then than they are now. ”

“ Though there is something slightly ridiculous in the zeal with which the advocates of Home Rule, using at least as much industry as discrimination, have scraped together every instance they can lay their hands upon of constitutions under which something which can be called Home Rule exists without producing palpable injury to the State, it would be unfair to deny some real weight to a kind of induction, which, if not convincing as argument, yet possesses undoubtedly a good deal of rhetorical effectiveness. ”

“ Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing. (2)
The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right. (3)
No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.
Health care, food, water and social security
27. ”

“ First, the interest of the retarded in establishing group homes is substantial. The right to "establish a home" has long been cherished as one of the fundamental liberties embraced by the Due Process Clause. ”

“ For the better part of this century, America has made homeownership a priority of national policy. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration's home mortgage insurance program, empowering more than 23 million Americans to buy their own homes. ”

“ While an agitation for self-government lasts, a country is stagnant, retrograde, or, like Ireland, progressive only by dint of extraordinary native exertions. Read the Durham report on the condition of the Canadas during the long agitation for Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of things. The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissipate their energies on minor ends. ”

“ Whereas the Congress in the Housing Act of 1949 has declared that the general welfare and security of the Nation and the health and living standards of its people require the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family ”

“ It is absolutely essential, but it will not be easy, to make substantial administrative economies at the outset, not only from the additional stress of novel work which will be thrown upon a Home Rule Government, but from the widespread claims of vested interests. It will require courageous statesmanship, backed by courageous public opinion, to overhaul a bureaucracy so old and extensive. Take the police, for example, the first and most urgent subject for reduction. ”

“ Apply suitable remedial measures, say the Unionists, to the social and economic conditions of the country, and it is not unreasonable to hope that political discontent—or, in other words, the demand for Home Rule—will gradually die away of itself. ”

“ Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has, at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa, and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material for an indictment on the ground of bad character. ”

“ All Constitutions, whether the sole work of the men who are to live under them, like that of the United States, or the gift of a Sovereign State to a dependency, or the joint work of a Sovereign and a dependent State, contain restrictions designed for the common good. The criterion of their value is the measure of consent they meet with from those who have to live under and work the Constitution, and it is that circumstance which makes it urgent that Irish opinion should be evoked upon their future Constitution, and that the Irish Nationalist party should think out its own scheme of Home Rule. ”

“ Want of housing accommodation is helping to thin our country population, and the Housing Acts have been simply ignored in the past by Rural Sanitary Authorities. On this head the Housing Bill of 1909 makes salutary provisions giving county councils power to act in default of rural district councils, and also giving power to the Local Government Board to order schemes to be carried out within a reasonable time. ”

“ However, considering the question on its merits, it was said that the act of congress did not intend 'to cut off the power to exempt particular kinds of property, if the legislature chose to do so.' In illustration of this view reference was made to exemptions of homesteads, household furniture, school-houses, academies, and libraries,-regulations sustained, as a general rule, upon grounds of policy and humanity, or because the property exempted is employed for objects more or less connected with the public welfare. ”

“ American Governors were at any rate resident, or mainly resident, and a few were good and popular administrators, though the information which most of them supplied to the Home Government showed a blindness to what was going on under their very eyes which would be incomprehensible if we did not know by experience that it is the invariable result of irresponsible rule over white men, whether at home or abroad. ”

“ Home Rule as the revival of Grattan's Constitution is an impossibility. The Constitution of 1782 belongs to a past age, and cannot by any miracle of political art be at the present day restored to life. ”

“ Those cases shed a revelatory light on the character of the single-family zoning ordinance challenged in this case.
Litigation involving single-family zoning ordinances is common. Although there appear to be almost endless differences in the language used in these ordinances, [3] they contain three principal types of restrictions. First, they define the kind of structure that may be erected on vacant land. [4] Second, they require that a single-family home be occupied only by a "single housekeeping unit." ”

“ Accordingly, it is the policy of my Administration that the Federal Government shall work with communities to end housing discrimination, to provide redress to those who have experienced housing discrimination, to eliminate racial bias and other forms of discrimination in all stages of home-buying and renting, to lift barriers that restrict housing and neighborhood choice, to promote diverse and inclusive communities, to ensure sufficient physically accessible housing, and to secure equal access to housing opportunity for all. ”

“ In cities where people live crowded together in closely built city blocks, unsanitary conditions in one home endanger the health of the entire community. There is also danger from fire, and vice and crime may breed and spread quickly and unseen. The community is driven, therefore, in its own defense, to regulate the people's housing. In small communities, and especially in rural communities, where homes are more widely separated and in some cases quite isolated, it has seemed of little concern to others how one citizen builds his home and what he does in it. ”

“ The farmers of the other three provinces, without a shred of law or custom on their side, are, it is true, here and there making out a law for themselves; but, on the whole, they are yielding, sinking, withering off the earth. From north, south, east, and west, comes a terrible cry of terror and of agony—Spare us, spare us our lives and lands!
In this crisis comes in the ‘Government’ with a ‘Bill to ameliorate the relations of landlord and tenant.’ A fine phrase! a liberal and conciliatory phrase! But the bill, the bill! Surely it legalizes tenant-right at last? ”