England’s Disgrace: J.S. Mill and the Irish Question

292 Pages·2001·8.216 MB·English

by  Bruce L. Kinzer

BRUCE L. KINZER
England's Disgrace?
J.S. Mill and the
Irish Question
UTP
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
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© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-4862-5
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kinzer, Bruce L., 1948-
England's disgrace? : J.S. Mill and the Irish question
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4862-5
i. Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873 - Views on Ireland. 2. Irish question.
3. Ireland - Politics and government - 19th century. I. Title.
DA95O.K56 2001 941.5081 000-932439-9
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX
Introduction 3
I Mill and Ireland in the Age of O'Connell 8
II The Famine 44
III Ireland and the Principles of Political Economy,
1848-1865 87
IV The Irish University Question 120
V The Fenian Challenge and Irish Land 164
Epilogue 212
NOTES 217
BIBLIOGRAPHY 26l
INDEX 275
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Acknowledgments
My initiation as a student of Mill was singularly auspicious. For four
years I served as a post-doctoral fellow on the John Stuart Mill Project at
the University of Toronto. The tutelage of John M. Robson, the general
editor of Mill's Collected Works, shaped my scholarship on Mill. My debt
to him before his death in 1995 was incalculable; it has not diminished
since. During my years on the Mill Project I also gained from the
companionship and support of those who happily shared in the work
there was to be done: Marion Filipiuk, Michael Laine, Ann Robson, and
the late Rea Wilmshurst. Their connection with this book is remote in
time but not in spirit. The same is true of the late J.B. Conacher, who
introduced me to the peculiar pleasures of Victorian political history.
Friends who at some point had valuable things to say about my work
on Mill and Ireland include Brian Harrison, Theo Hoppen, Jeff Lipkes,
Trevor Lloyd, and William Thomas. To them I am grateful, as I am to
Peter Gray for kindly making available a portion of his important book
Famine, Land and Politics before its publication. I also want to thank
friends in England and Ireland - Angela Ellis, Ted and Susan Gould,
Con and Anne Bushe - who provided hospitality and logistical support
during the first half of 1996. The research I did at that time was made
possible by a research reassignment granted by the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington and by a visiting fellowship awarded by Cor-
pus Christi College, Oxford. To the President and Fellows of the latter I
remain much obliged. My absence from home in these months imposed
notable burdens on my wife, Deborah, and daughters, Amanda and
Anna. For their indulgence I shall always be grateful. The manuscript
made possible by that indulgence benefited from the careful reading of
two anonymous referees and from the meticulous copy-editing of John
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x Acknowledgments
The following institutions furnished access to materials needed for
this study: the Randall Library at the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington; the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill; the Perkins Library at Duke University; the Milton S.
Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University; the Robarts Library
at the University of Toronto; the British Library (including the Newspa-
per Library at Colindale); the Institute of Historical Research; the Li-
brary of University College London; the British Library of Political and
Economic Science at the London School of Economics; the Bodleian
Library at Oxford University; the Library of Reading University; the
National Library of Ireland in Dublin; and the Library of Trinity Col-
lege Dublin. I thank the staffs of these institutions.
For permission to quote from manuscript collections I am grateful to
the following: the Council of Trustees, National Library of Ireland
(Cairnes Papers); Special Collections Department, Milton S. Eisenhower
Library, Johns Hopkins University (John Stuart Mill Letters); Lord
Methuen and the British Library of Political and Economic Science
(Courtney Collection); the British Library of Political and Economic
Science (Mill-Taylor Collection).
Publication of this book was generously assisted by Kenyon College.
BRUCE L. KINZER
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Introduction
John Stuart Mill never travelled to Ireland; his words did. The genres
through which he imparted the words that had a direct bearing on the
Irish question were diverse: periodical and newspaper journalism, chap-
ters in the Principles of Political Economy, a pamphlet, and parliamentary
speeches. Ultimately some of these words had a telling effect, if not
invariably in the way Mill had intended. Although not all of what he
said on the subject of Ireland merited the close attention of his contem-
poraries, a portion of that output was very striking and noteworthy. It
remains so to this day. The fact that many mid-Victorians attended to
Mill's thoughts on Ireland stemmed in considerable measure from the
stature he enjoyed as a leading public moralist and the pre-eminent
mind of his age. In his Dictionary of National Biography entry on Mill,
Leslie Stephen justly stated: '[N]o historian of the social and political
movement in his time can fail to note the extraordinary influence which
he exercised for a generation; the purity and energy of his purpose; and
his immense services in the encouragement of active speculation, and
of the most important movements of his time.'1 Less heed, naturally,
was paid in the years before Mill acquired this stature.
The Ireland upon which Mill commented was constitutionally part of
the United Kingdom. The Irish rebellion of 1798, coupled with the
grave threat to English security posed by Revolutionary France, per-
suaded the British government of the necessity for a legislative union
between Great Britain and Ireland. The Act of Union of 1800 abolished
the Dublin Parliament and gave to Ireland one hundred seats in the
House of Commons at Westminster. Twenty-eight Irish peers and four
bishops of the Anglican Church of Ireland were admitted to the House
of Lords. Relative to population, Ireland was underrepresented in the
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4 Introduction
United Kingdom Parliament. The great mass of the Irish population,
Roman Catholic in religion, had no direct representation whatever,
inasmuch as Catholics were by law excluded from Parliament. The
Anglo-Irish, adherents of the established episcopalian Church of Ire-
land, had controlled the Dublin Parliament and thought of themselves
as the true Irish nation. They constituted approximately 10 per cent of
the population. In the province of Ulster there was a concentration of
Presbyterians, who made up about 8 per cent of Ireland's population.
William Pitt the Younger, prime minister when the Union was created,
had hoped to follow the Act of Union with measures to relieve Catho-
lics of their remaining disabilities. This intent was thwarted by resist-
ance from within his own ranks, mightily reinforced by the resolute
opposition of George III. From 1801 to 1828 the individuals occupying
Irish seats in the House of Commons and senior administrative posi-
tions in Ireland were invariably Protestant. While the Anglo-Irish as-
cendancy was in a sense still in place, its operation after 1800 was
constrained in a way that had not been the case before the Union. As
K. Theodore Hoppen puts it, '[T]he Protestant ascendancy was no
longer in business on its own account but had been taken over by a
larger international corporation, which, though itself "Protestant", had
different and more complex priorities at heart.'2 J.S. Mill would have to
take note of these 'complex priorities.'
Mill's involvement with the Irish question, albeit sporadic in charac-
ter, spanned more than four decades and embraced a variety of ele-
ments. One of the earliest essays he composed for publication dealt
with Ireland. Published in the Parliamentary History and Review in 1826,
this article used the highly charged debate over the admission of Catho-
lics to Parliament to excoriate aristocratic government and its deplor-
able effects.3 In the 18305, when Mill's career as a political journalist
reached its apogee (an inglorious apogee it proved to be),4 Irish issues
held a prominent place in public debate. Mill commented upon those
issues because he could not ignore them, but he did so without formu-
lating a satisfactory conceptualization of Ireland's relation to his own
political agenda. Having abandoned the political fray, Mill in the mid-
18405 grappled with the practical and the theoretical sides of the Irish
land question. A mingling of the great Irish famine and of Mill's great
work on political economy, then in progress, was chiefly responsible
for this encounter with Ireland. The result was an exceedingly ambi-
tious series of forty-three leading articles, written for the Morning Chroni-
cle over a period of three months in late 1846 and early 1847, m which
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Introduction 5
Mill advocated the creation of a peasant proprietary on the waste lands
of Ireland. Between 1848 and 1865 Mill's Principles of Political Economy
went through six editions (excluding the People's Edition of 1865). The
substantive changes he made in the sections on Ireland from one edi-
tion to the next provide a broad indication of his evolving views on the
subject. Changes he made for the 1865 edition were influenced by John
Elliot Cairnes. Mill's seat in Parliament and friendship with Cairnes
drew him into the battle over the Irish university system, a battle whose
outcome, in Cairnes's judgment (and in that of the Irish Roman Catho-
lic bishops), would have grave consequences for the future of Irish
society. The problems this issue caused Mill reveal something of the
dilemma faced by liberals when a powerful, authoritarian institution
with a mass constituency (such as the Roman Catholic church in Ire-
land) uses its freedom of action in a liberal state to propagate doctrines
inimical to the values upon which that state rests. Mill's part in the Irish
university controversy also throws light on the impact his strategy for a
radicalization of the Liberal party had on his political action. Like the
debate engendered by the university question, the Fenian upheavals of
1866 and 1867 coincided with Mill's years in the House of Commons.
His estimation of Irish nationalism and of British rule in Ireland at a
critical moment in the history of the Union can be ascertained from his
response to the Fenian threat. Mill's 1868 pamphlet England and Ireland,
in which he urgently pressed for granting Irish tenants fixity of tenure,
was his explosive answer to Fenianism.
There is an article literature on Mill and Ireland that examines several
of these elements. The seminal contributions were made by E.D. Steele
in two articles that appeared in the Historical Journal in 1970.5 Steele's
object was to investigate the ways in which Mill's views on the Irish
land question changed between the first edition of the Principles of
Political Economy and the publication of England and Ireland. He depicts
a Mill who, in practice if not in theory, took a rather cautious line on the
issue until the Fenians made their mark. In response to Fenianism,
Steele argues, Mill adopted a radical position from an imperialistic
conviction that the Union must be preserved and that fixity of tenure
was the only means to its preservation. Apart from R.N. Lebow's
editorial introduction to a collection of Mill's writings on Ireland that
came out in 1979,6 Steele monopolized the subject until 1983. In that
year an article by Lynn Zastoupil (also in Historical Journal) explored, in
a brief compass, Mill's treatment of the famine.7 Zastoupil used this
episode to illustrate his central contention that Mill's chief concern was
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6 Introduction
for the moral improvement of the Irish masses. A challenge to Steele's
interpretation was implicit in Zastoupil's account, but he gave only
cursory attention to Mill's post-famine association with the Irish ques-
tion and did not directly engage the crux of Steele's argument. Another
1983 article, by T.A. Boylan and T.P. Foley, focused on the role played
by J.E. Cairnes in shaping Mill's treatment of Irish land after i865.8
Although Cairnes deserves the close scrutiny of anyone interested in
Mill and the Irish question in the 18605, the case made by Boylan and
Foley for his influence on the content of England and Ireland is far from
compelling. In an article published in 1984 I took issue with certain
features of the interpretations set forth by Steele and Zastoupil, sug-
gesting that the former had given undue weight to Mill's 'imperialism'
and that the latter had somewhat misjudged Mill's disposition on Irish
nationalism.9 This piece evidently killed all interest in the subject of
Mill and Ireland save for that sustained by its author: in 1987 I brought
out an article on Mill and the university question and in 1993 one on
Mill and the Catholic question in the i82os.10 In addition to this body of
journal material, which concentrates on Mill and Ireland, there is a
cognate cluster of articles whose epicentre is the issue of peasant pro-
prietorship.11
Discussion of Mill and Irish land can be found in books as well as
articles. Studies on Mill that provide some coverage of the topic include
David Martin's useful short book John Stuart Mill and the Land Question
(Hull, 1981); Samuel Hollander's imposing work The Economics of John
Stuart Mill (2 vols., Toronto, 1985); Janice Carlisle's strikingly innova-
tive John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Athens, Georgia, 1991);
a monograph by Kinzer, Robson, and Robson on Mill's parliamentary
career, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westmin-
ster, 1865-1868 (Toronto, 1992); Lynn Zastoupil's study John Stuart Mill
and India (Stanford, 1994); and Jeff Lipkes's recently published Politics,
Religion and Classical Political Economy: John Stuart Mill and His Followers
(New York, 1999). Important books by historians of Ireland that con-
sider aspects of the subject include R.D. Collison Black, Economic Thought
and the Irish Question, 1817-1870 (Cambridge, 1960); Philip Bull, Land,
Politics & Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (New York,
1996); and Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and
Irish Society, 1843-1850 (Dublin and Portland, 1999).
From the books and articles mentioned above much of value can be
learned about Mill's connection with the Irish question. None of them,
however, purports to supply a comprehensive examination of the sub-
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Introduction 7
ject; collectively, they furnish nothing like a coherent or complete ac-
count. The aim of what follows is to fashion a thorough and systematic
analysis of Mill's multifaceted engagement with the Irish question.
An appraisal of that engagement must be embedded in the ebb and
flow of the Irish question as it alternately receded from and obtruded
upon the English political consciousness from the 18205 to the 18705.
Many of the factors governing Mill's handling of the problem were part
and parcel of a changing English political environment, one in which
he sought to create for himself an influential place as radical critic and
purposeful agent. His trenchant assaults on English parochialism not-
withstanding, Mill's own perspective on the Irish question had an
Anglocentric tilt. The condition of Ireland mattered to him mainly for
what it said about the condition of England - moral, intellectual, and
political.
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