Home Rule

“ But there seems to be no limit in certain minds to the prejudice against the principle of Home Rule. If it is seen to work well, the phenomenon is hurriedly swept into oblivion, and its results attributed with feverish ingenuity to any cause but the true one. ”

“ There are some amongst us who consider that Home Rule, is an immediate necessity. Others believe that Home Rule, at present without the fulfilment of certain preliminary conditions would be attended with disastrous results. ”

“ If the vital energy now poured into sheer uncompromising opposition to the principles of Home Rule could be transmuted into intellectual and moral effort after the best form of Home Rule, I believe that the result would be a drastic scheme. ”

“ They sacrificed everything for Home Rule; even their own profoundly national emotion of contempt. For the sake of Home Rule, or the solemn promise of Home Rule, they kept such men in power; and for their reward they found that such men were still in power ”

“ We have a right to Home Rule, an abstract right to manage our own affairs, and I believe in the principle. But I want such men as Andrew Jameson, or Jonathan Hogg, or that other Quaker, Pym, the big draper. There we have honourable gentlemen, whom we or the English alike might trust, either as to ability or integrity. ”

“ Step into Plunkett House, that hospitable headquarters of the Organization Society, and if you have been nurtured in legends about inextinguishable class and creed antipathies, which are supposed to render Home Rule impossible and the eternal "umpirage" of Great Britain inevitable, you will soon learn to marvel that anyone can be found to propagate them. ”

“ In hotels, on the steamers, in railway carriages, on tramcars, in the market-place, on the steps of the temples, at the corners of the streets, in the music halls, the wondering stranger hears of Home Rule, Home Rule, Home Rule, first, last, midst, and without end. ”

“ If this be a counsel of perfection; if the difficult and delicate task of settling the details of Irish Home Rule is to be hampered and complicated by the resuscitation of those time-honoured discussions over abstract principles which ought long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let every patriotic and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten and mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations, and to substitute reason for passion. ”

“ Yet Maintenance of the Union, Separation, Home Rule, are names which designate the only paths open to us. To one of these three courses we are absolutely tied down. Each path is arduous. To complain about the nature of things is childish. The course of wisdom is obvious. We must all of us look facts in the face. "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My aim is not so much to analyse with precision the mode in which the cause of Home Rule is fostered by the moral atmosphere of the day, as to insist upon the all-important consideration that the progress of the Home Rule movement is due rather to the encouragement it derives from prevailing sentiment than to any intellectual conviction on the part of Englishmen that it is dictated by considerations of sound policy. ”

“ Nor does the zealous advocate of Home Rule pause at the conclusion that the measure he recommends may, on the strength of foreign experience, be regarded as a tolerable evil or as a probable cure for a chronic disease. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That's human nature. So he votes for Home Rule, for anything that promises the land to himself, as the son of the soil. He looks on the other man as an interloper, and his priest encourages that view. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How is it that their children never run barefoot? How is it that their families are well educated, that their dwellings are clean, and that they pay their way? Home Rule may impoverish those whom the teachings and habits of Protestantism have enriched, but neither Home Rule nor anything else will enrich those whom Popery has impoverished. ”

“ Home Rule will banish the landlords, and give the people the land for nothing at all. The peasantry are mostly fine-grown men, well-built and well-nourished, bearing no external trace of the hardships they claim to have endured. ”

“ The assertion, however, that to look at Home Rule from an English point of view is the way to minimise irritation, and to deal fairly with a topic specially requiring fair treatment, requires some explanation.
Experience of the world teaches every man that in complicated affairs of private life, involving questions, say, both of money and of sentiment, nothing so surely prevents quarrels as to separate in the clearest manner possible matters of business from matters of feeling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The second of the advantages which marks the proposed mode of argument is that a line of thought which fixes a reader's attention all but exclusively upon the probable effects of Home Rule is a preservative against the errors which arise from introducing into a dispute, bitter enough in itself, all the poisonous venom of historical recrimination, and all the delusions which are the offspring of the misleading tendency to personify nations. ”

“ But the first duty of Home Rulers, both in Great Britain and Ireland, is to avoid the carefully-baited trap of a quarrel on points of detail. That is the obvious game of the enemies of Home Rule. The proper policy of every true Home Ruler is to preserve through all the vicissitudes of those financial discussions a sane and steady perspective, well knowing that, after all, finance is not really the true heart of this problem.
THE MIGHTY HOPE
We must not reduce a great human problem to a squabble over pocket-money. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Don't you think anybody could see that they are taking advantage of the unsettled state of things to avoid any payment whatever? They await Home Rule, which is to give them the land, and they are anticipating its advantages. ”

“ If it were not for the inveterate prejudice against Home Rule on other than financial grounds, no one would dream of disputing them; for they are based on principles universally accepted in every part of the British Empire but Ireland, and in most parts of the civilized world. ”

“ English Home Rulers, unable to see a yard in front of them, whose training and instincts are of the goody-goody, milk and water type,—the lily-livered weaklings, who measure the courage of others by their own,—may be excused their inability to conceive the situation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then an old man on the bridge declaring to the multitude that he would not be a Papist for all that earth could give, and that nothing could induce his fellow-citizens to submit to Home Rule for one second of time. ”

“ To keep one's mind clear on this point is of importance, because the result follows that, as already intimated, a whole series of arguments or claims which may fairly be put forward by a Nationalist are not available to a Home Ruler. ”

“ A Scottish Covenanter, not of the straitest sect, has no faith in the Home Rule Bill. He said:—"The people up in the mountains, those who want Home Rule, or rather those who have voted for it and expect to benefit by it, are all of the class no Act of Parliament would ever help. ”

“ When, however, the instances on which the induction is supposed to be founded are carefully scrutinised, it will be discovered that those examples which deserve attention are far less numerous than might be supposed from a glance over the lists now well known to the public of what may be termed successful experiments in Home Rule, and, further, that this limited number of instances do not go far to make out the conclusion in favour of which they are adduced. ”

“ The whole history of the connection between the two islands which make up the United Kingdom is a warning of the wretchedness, the calamities, the wickedness and the ruin which follow upon the attempt to violate this fundamental principle not only of popular, but of all good and just government. Home Rule may appear to be an innovation. ”

“ Here, just because men are working together in a practical, self-contained, home-ruled organization for the good of the whole country, you will find liberality, open-mindedness, brotherhood, and keen, intelligent patriotism from Ulsterman and Southerners alike. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She carefully regards the warnings set up along the path of the would-be homesteader, which are these: see the land itself before deciding; decide that the home you are seeking is to be a permanent one; be sure that you are adapted for silence and solitariness; and finally, this all-important rule—have enough capital for buildings, for cattle and horses, for machinery, wells, cisterns and seed, and enough more to carry you over a bad year or two, before you undertake the great task. ”

“ And misgovernment increased, and passions rose, and blood flowed, while, in the guise of dispassionate psychologists, a great many narrow, egotistical, and bullying people at home propounded these arid conundrums. Where is our common sense? ”

“ Where the spirit of love and duty pervades the home, where head and heart bear rule wisely there, where the daily life is honest and virtuous, where the government is sensible, kind, and loving, then may we expect from such a home an issue of healthy, useful, and happy beings, capable as they gain the requisite strength, of following the footsteps of their parents, of walking uprightly, governing themselves wisely, and contributing to the welfare of those about them. ”

“ But the fact remains, that all these accidental homes must, in some way, be brought into harmony with the lives to be lived in them, and the habits and wants of the family; and not only this, they must be made attractive according to the requirements of cultivated society. The effort toward this is instructive, and the pleasure in and enjoyment of the home depends upon the success of the effort. The inmates, as a rule, are quite clear as to what they want to accomplish, but have seldom had sufficient experience to enable them to remedy defects of construction. ”

“ They will discover that they are engaged in a contest with the will of the people, and deprived, as they will be, of the moral sympathy which has hitherto given them comfort and encouragement, will yield obedience to a law which is the expression of the national will. ”

“ Hence the growth of the conviction that property has at least as many duties as rights, and of the faith inspired, rather by compassion than by reason, that the toiling multitudes can and must be made to share in the prosperity and the luxuries created in great part by their ceaseless labour. ”

“ The first of these advantages is that it diverts the mind from a crowd of personal, temporary, and in themselves trivial considerations, which, though they possess not only an apparent but also a real significance, are at bottom irrelevant to the final decision of the true points at issue. ”

“ The Charter contained a clause for liberty of conscience on the instructive ground that, "by reason of the remote distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and conformity established in this realm." ”

“ A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there -- in solitary confinement. ”

“ There are local bodies which have applied the Artisans’ Dwellings Act and cleared away houses or hovels, of which the medical officers’ descriptions are not fit for repetition in polite society. There are those who have built, and more who are ready to build, houses which shall at any rate give the people healthy surroundings, possibilities of home life and of common pleasures, even when a family can afford only a single room. ”