It would take me too far from the scope of this volume into the field of contemporary politics if I attempted to point out who is to blame for this state of things, or what are the remedies. It is enough to say that this is the real Irish problem, and to point to it as an instance of the calamitous effects which inevitably follow when the instincts of a whole population are brought by an unfavourable combination of circumstances into necessary and natural antagonism with the laws which they are bound to obey.
Conservative legislation, by whatever party it is introduced, really means making the law correspond with the common sense and common morality of all except the criminal and crotchety classes, so that the majority may feel it to be their friend. For instance, the most truly conservative measure of recent times was probably that which legalised trades’ unions and gave working-men full liberty to combine for an increase of wages. The old legal maxim, that such combinations were illegal as being in restraint of trade, was so obviously an invention of the members of the upper caste who wore horsehair wigs, to give their fellows of the same caste who employed labour an unfair advantage, that it could not fail to cause feelings of discontent and exasperation among the masses of working-men. By its repeal the sting has been taken out of Socialism, and the British working-man has come to be, in the main, a reasonable citizen, on whom incitements to violence in order to inaugurate Utopias, fall as lightly as the howlings of the barren east wind on the chimney-tops. It has led also to reasonable and peaceful adjustment of disputes between employers and labourers by arbitration and sliding-scales instead of by strikes and lock-outs. In the United States of America the law-abiding instinct is even stronger. We find that strikes attended with violence are almost always confined mainly to the foreign element of recently imported immigrants, and that the native-born American citizen considers the laws as his own laws, and is determined to have them respected.
The balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies is, however, at the best, always imperfect, and inclines too much sometimes in one and sometimes in the other direction. In England the conservative tendency has had on the whole too much preponderance. I do not speak of political institutions, for in these of late years the balance has been pretty equally preserved; but in practical matters there is still a good deal of old-fashioned stolid obstruction. This is most apparent in law and in education. The common or judge-made law, though on the whole well-intentioned and upright, is fettered by so many technicalities and musty precedents, that it fails in a great many instances to be, what civil law ought to be, a cheap, speedy, and intelligible instrument for enforcing honest dealings between man and man. One of our greatest railway contractors once said to me, ‘If I want to make an agreement which shall be absolutely binding, I make it myself on a sheet of note-paper; if I want to have a loophole, I send it to my lawyer to have it drawn up in legal language and engrossed on sheets of parchment.’ Another man of large experience in commercial and financial matters laid down this axiom: ‘If you want to know what is the law in a doubtful case, reason out what is the common-sense view of it, and assume that the direct opposite is probably the law.’ These may be extreme instances, as all such epigrammatic sentences generally are, but it is undeniable that they have a considerable basis of substantial truth; and that law, with its dilatory processes, its enormous expense, and its uncertain conclusions, may be, and often is, not an instrument of justice, but a weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer or of a dishonest rich man, to extort blackmail or to defeat just claims.