V. I.

Lenin

What is taking place today in the British Parliament in
connection with the Bill on Irish Home Rule is of exceptional
interest as far as class relationships and elucidation of the national and
the agrarian problems are concerned.

For centuries England has enslaved Ireland, condemned the Irish
peasants to unparalleled misery and gradual extinction from starvation,
driven them off the land and compelled hundreds of thousands and even
millions of them to leave their native country and emigrate to America. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ireland had a population of five
and a half millions; today the population is only four and one-third
millions. Ireland has become depopulated. Over five million Irish emigrated
to America in the course of the nineteenth century, so that there are now
more Irish in the United States than there are in Ireland!

The appalling destitution and sufferings of the Irish peasantry are an
instructive example of the lengths to which the landowners and the liberal
bourgeoisie of a “dominant” nation will go. Britain owes her
“brilliant” economic development and the “prosperity” of her industry
and commerce largely to her treatment of the Irish peasantry, which recalls
the misdeeds of the Russian serf-owner
Saltychikha. [1]

While Britain “flourished”, Ireland moved towards extinction and
remained an undeveloped, semi-barbarous, purely agrarian country, a land of
poverty-stricken tenant farmers. But much as the “enlightened and
liberal” British bourgeoisie desired to perpetuate Ireland’s enslavement
and poverty, reform inevitably approached, the more so that the
revolutionary eruptions of the Irish people’s fight for liberty and land
became more and more ominous. The year 1861 saw the formation of the Irish revolutionary organisation of
Fenians . Irish settlers in America gave it every assistance.

With the formation, in 1868, of the government of Gladstone—that hero
of the liberal bourgeoisie and obtuse philistines—the era of reform in Ireland set in, an era which has dragged on very nicely till
the present day, i.e., just under half a century. Oh, the wise statesmen of
the liberal bourgeoisie are very well able to “make haste slowly” in the
matter of reform!

Karl Marx, who had been living in London for over fifteen years,
followed the struggle of the Irish with great interest and sympathy. He
wrote to Frederick Engels on November 2, 1867:
“I have done my best to bring about this demonstration of the English
workers in favour of Fenianism.... I used to think the separation of
Ireland from England impossible. I now think it inevitable, although after
the separation there may come federation....” Reverting to the same
subject in a letter dated November 30th of the same year, Marx wrote:
“The question now is, what shall we advise the English workers? In my
opinion they must make the repeal of the Union [the abolition of the union
with Ireland] (in short, the affair of 1783, only democratised and adapted
to the conditions of the time) an article of their pronunziamento . This is the only legal and therefore only possible
form of Irish emancipation which can be admitted in the programme of an
English [workers’] party.” [2] And Marx went on to show that what the Irish needed was Home
Rule and independence of Britain, an agrarian revolution and tariffs
against Britain.

Such was the programme proposed to the British workers by Marx, in the
interests of Irish freedom, of accelerating the social development and
freedom of the British workers; because the British workers could not
become free so long as they helped to keep another nation in slavery (or
even allowed it).

Alas! Owing to a number of special historical causes, the British
workers of the last third of the nineteenth century proved dependent upon
the Liberals, impregnated with the spirit of liberal-labour policy. They
proved to be, not at the head of nations and classes fighting for liberty,
but in

the wake of the contemptible lackeys of the money-bags, the British
Liberals.

And the Liberals have for half a century been dragging out
Ireland’s liberation, which has not been completed to this day! It was not
until the twentieth century that the Irish peasant began to turn from a
tenant farmer into a free holder; but the Liberals have imposed upon him a
system of land purchase at a “ fair ” price ! He has paid, and will continue to pay for many years, millions upon millions
to the British landlords as a reward for their having robbed him for
centuries and reduced him to a state of chronic starvation. The British
liberal bourgeois has made the Irish peasant thank the landlord for this in
hard cash....

A Home Rule Bill for Ireland is now going through
Parliament. But in Ireland there is the Northern province of Ulster, which
is inhabited partly by English-born Protestants as distinct from the
Catholic Irish. Well then, the British Conservatives, led by Carson, the
British version of our Black-Hundred landlord Purishkevich, have raised a
frightful outcry against Irish Home Rule. This, they say, means subjecting
Ulstermen to an alien people of alien creed! Lord Carson has threatened
rebellion, and has organised gangs of reactionary armed thugs for this
purpose.

An empty threat, of course. There can be no question of a rebellion by
a handful of hoodlums. Nor could there be any question of an Irish
Parliament (whose powers are determined by British law)
“oppressing” the Protestants.

It is simply a question of the reactionary landlords trying to
scare the Liberals.

And the Liberals are losing their nerve, bowing to the reactionaries,
making concessions to them, offering to conduct a referendum in
Ulster and put off reform for Ulster for six years!

The haggling between the Liberals and the reactionaries
continues. Reform can wait: the Irish have waited half a century; they can
wait a little longer; you can’t very well “offend” the landlords!

Of course, if the Liberals appealed to the people of Britain, to the
proletariat, Carson’s reactionary gangs would melt away immediately and
disappear. The peaceful and full achievement of freedom by Ireland would be
guaranteed.

But is it conceivable that the liberal bourgeois will turn to the
proletariat for aid against the landlords? Why, the Liberals in Britain are
also lackeys of the money-bags,capable only of cringing to the Carsons.

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Notes:
[1]
Saltychikha ( Saltykova, D. I. ) (1730–1801)—a landowner, notorious for her brutal treatment of her serfs. She was
responsible for the death of 139 peasants. The name Saltychikha became a
synonym for bestial treatment of the peasants by the feudalist squirearchy.

[2]
See Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955,
p. 236.