In 1864 a Committee of the House of Commons inquired into the taxation of Ireland, but it led to no useful result. In other directions the monotony of neglect continued. The Government and Parliament paid little or no attention to Irish needs. Ireland was the Cinderella of the three kingdoms, and fared accordingly.
The third period ranged from 1869 to 1896. It might be termed the Home Rule period, for it includes the two Home Rule Bills of Mr. Gladstone, but it includes also other great measures relating to Ireland. Indeed, during the whole period of seventeen years Ireland engrossed, to a great degree, the attention of Parliament. The change was very remarkable. Up to 1869 England was indifferent to, or bored by, Ireland. She was stupid. She did not trouble herself to learn Irish wants, and she could not understand the spirit of Irish nationality. The Devon Commission, a Conservative Commission, appointed by a Conservative Minister, Sir Robert Peel, reported that 2,500,000 people in Ireland were on the verge of starvation, and gave warning of the evils, the perils, inherent in the Irish land system. England took no notice of either warning. The famine answered the first in cruel fashion. The second was pigeon-holed. Wise in her own Home administration, wise of late years in her Colonial administration, she knew no remedy for Ireland but force, and force is no remedy. She accepted, almost as matters of ordinary administration, Coercion Acts which marked with a black stigma most years of the century, unable to see that that fact alone was a disgrace to her statesmen, her Parliament, and her people.
Early in the Home Rule days I heard a great English statesman say: “The first duty of a Government is to bring the people into agreement with the law; till it does that it fails in its first duty, and England has hitherto failed to bring Ireland into agreement with the law”—a truth well and forcibly expressed.
In 1869 a man of great power and eloquence, wide views, and firm resolve became Prime Minister. He realised the habitual injustice of England to Ireland, and he saw the perils impending. By his strength of will he forced an unwilling country and an indifferent Parliament to devote its serious attention to Irish questions. He disestablished the Church. He was defeated on Irish education, but he laid the foundation of a land settlement by conferring on the tenants, in spite of strenuous opposition from the Tories, the rights of fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale, and his measures were marked by an earnest desire to deal liberally with Ireland to the utmost extent consistent with equity to the British tax-payer. Finally, when Ireland sent to Westminster more than four-fifths of her representatives pledged to Home Rule, he accepted this expression of the national will, and became a convert to the principle of Home Rule. I deal later in detail with his two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, which were defeated, and I need only here deal with finance of the third period, apart from the provision of the Home Rule Bills.
