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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

Home Rule

Home Rule.

Home Rule is not a distinctively Radical measure : it is a Nation alist measure. For instance, Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt are both Nationalists; but in an Irish Parliament, Mr. Parnell will lead the middle-class Whig party against Mr. Davitt, who is a working-class Eadical. The principle of Eadicalism is Equality of Rights, economic as well as political, so as to secure as far as possible equality of opportunity. The principle of Nationalism is the determination which every people bearing a distinctly marked national character shews, sooner page 11 or later, to govern itself in its own way, and to throw off the government of a different nation. Whether such government be good or bad, it becomes hated because it is foreign and unsympathetic; and in the end it can only be maintained by the suspension of Radical Democracy and the introduction of Tory Coercion. The Italians would not be governed by the Austrians, nor the Greeks by the Turks. Poland hates the rule of Russia; and Ireland protests against the rule of England, demanding to be federated with her as an equal and not chained to her as a subject. Thorough-going Radicals have never denied this claim. Their advocacy of it is not, like that of the Gladstonian Liberals, the effect of a four-year-old conversion; for the demand for "Repeal of the Union" was seconded in 1841 by the English Radicals. Of late years "Unionism" has become mainly a pretext for postponing English social reforms and for accustoming the public to the most dangerous infringements of the rights of free speech, public meeting, and the liberty of the press. This in itself is sufficient reason for getting rid of it, even for those who attach no importance to the principle of Nationalism.

The above programme is sufficient for the present to fill the hands of the True Workers' Party—the New Radical Party—in a word, the Practical Socialist Party. It consists of measures bearing directly and immediately on the health and prosperity of the mass of the nation. It goes in true Radical fashion to the root of that great evil of class monopoly of Land and Capital of which the House of Lords, the sinecurists, the pensioners, the corruption of the Church, the clase bias of our Courts of Justice, the neglect and cruelty in our Workhouses and Prisons, the sloth, selfishness, and evil example of the Idle Rich, and the drunkenness and degradation of the ignorant and overworked Laborer, are all merely the branches. Middle-class politicians may continue issuing programmes as if these things did not exist or did not matter; but the test of the true Worker-Politician is his determination to place them first in the list of evils to be eradicated.