essay on home rule

Home Rule Movement: Essay & Important Notes

The Indian Independence Movement spanned over several years and several other movements became turning points in the struggle for freedom. One such movement was the Home Rule Movement . The Home Rule Movement was launched to demand dominion status for India and freedom from British Rule. The proponents of the movement were Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak .

Annie Besant (left) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (right)

The objectives of the Home Rule Movement were to:

• Achieve self-government for India.
• Promote political education and agitation for self-government.
• Enable the Indians to speak up against the suppression of the British government.
• Demand more political representation for the Indians from the Britishers.
• Revive political activity in India to strengthen and maintain the principles of the Congress.

Causes for the Beginning of the Movement

The Home Rule Movement was fueled by several different factors. Some of the causes for the beginning of the movement included the failure of the Government of India Act, 1919 to impress the Indians and its political leaders that led to the launch of the Home Rule Movement.

The split of the Congress in 1907 and the imprisonment of Bal Gangadhar Tilak had brought about a lull and silence in the political arena of India. However, the release of Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived the national movement. Tilak also understood the importance of the Congress in India and wanted to get readmitted into the party.

Annie Besant (an Irish orator, women rights activist, and writer) worked in India to support the Irish and Indian Home Rule Movements. It was on her persuasion that in the Indian National Congress Session of 1915, the extremists joined back the Congress. However, both Tilak and Annie Besant were not able to convince the Congress of setting up Home Rule Leagues initially. In the year 1916, Annie Besant convinced the Congress of educative propaganda and the establishment of local-level committees. She was able to set up the Home Rule League in September 1916. Tilak, on the other hand, was not bound by Congress in any of his activities and had set up the Home Rule League in April 1916.

There was a mutual understanding between the two Home Rule Leagues. Tilak’s league worked in Karnataka, Maharashtra (not Bombay), Berar, and the Central Provinces. Annie Besant’s league worked in the rest of the country. The two leagues never came close to each other because of the fear of falling out.

Activities of the Movement

The two home rule leagues in an attempt to achieve self-government in India adopted the following activities:

• Demonstrations and agitations against the British government.
• Public meetings wherein the leaders gave fiery speeches.
• Nationwide protests led to the arrest of Annie Besant.

Significance of the Movement

The Home Rule Movement was very significant because of its activities, its reach, and objectives. The Home Rule Movement is considered important because of the following reasons:

• The Home Rule Leagues carried out its activities throughout the year as opposed to the Congress.
• The movement attracted a lot of support from educated Indians and the two leagues together were able to amass almost 40,000 members.
• The movement also received support from several leaders of Congress as well as the Muslim League.
• The Home Rule Movement was able to unite the moderates, the extremists as well as the Muslim League for a short time period.
• With the help of the movement, many Indians were politically educated.
• The movement led to the Montague Declaration in 1917. It was declared that more Indians would be given government positions. The declaration called August Declaration implied that the demand for home rule would not be considered seditious.

Decline and Eventual Failure of the Movement

Several reasons led to the decline and failure of the movement. Some of them are given below:

• The home rule leagues were not able to gather a lot of support from the Muslims. Additionally, Anglo-Indians and non-Brahmins did not support the movement because they thought that the movement was for highly educated Indians.
• The movement was not a mass movement and was limited to college students and educated people.
• The moderates did not take the movement further because they were satisfied with the proposals of the government.
• Annie Besant was not able to provide strong and stable leadership to her followers.
• In the year 1918, Tilak went to England and his absence led to the abatement of the movement.

The Home Rule Movement was able to make the Indians politically educated about their freedom and rights and self-government.

Important Notes

• In December 1915, Bal Gangadhar Tilak started a home rule league in Pune. Tilak proclaimed that ‘Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it’. He started his Home Rule League in Maharashtra, Central Provinces, Karnataka, and the Berar region.
• Annie Besant started the Home Rule League to demand self-government at all levels of administration.
• The Home Rule Movement led to women’s participation in large numbers.
• The League joined hands with Indian National Congress demanding self-rule.
• As a result of the movement, the Government of India Act, 1919 was passed.

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• Home Rule Movement

NCERT Notes: Home Rule Movement

NCERT notes on important topics for the UPSC civil services exam preparation. These notes will also be useful for other competitive exams like banking PO, SSC, state civil services exams and so on.

Between the years 1916 and 1918, the Indian independence movement witnessed the growth and spread of the home rule movement spearheaded by leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant. The aim of the home rule movement was the attainment of home rule or a dominion status for India under the British Empire along the lines of countries like Canada and Australia. This movement was carried out through the two home rule leagues.

This is an important topic for the  IAS exam . Download Home Rule Movement notes PDF from the link given below.

Home Rule Movement (UPSC Notes):- Download PDF Here

• The Government of India Act 1909 was dissatisfactory to the aspirations of Indians.
• The Congress Party’s split in 1907 and fiery leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s imprisonment from 1908 to 1914 meant that there was a lull in the national movement.
• But Tilak’s release and the advent of Annie Besant brought about a revival of the national movement.
• Annie Besant was an Irish socialist, writer and orator who supported the Irish and Indian home rule movements. She arrived in India in 1893.
• The leaders in India were divided on whether to support Britain in the war or not. Annie Besant, however, declared, “England’s need is India’s opportunity”.
• Having returned from exile in Mandalay, Tilak understood the need for a revival of the nationalist movement in the country.
• He also understood the growing importance of the Congress Party in India’s political scene. So, his first task was to get readmitted into the party. (The extremists led by Tilak had separated from the Congress).
• In the Congress session of December 1915, it was decided to let the extremists re-join the party largely due to Annie Besant’s persuasion. Besant had also recognised the need for Congress approval and the active participation of the extremists in the national struggle.
• However, Besant and Tilak were not able to convince Congress to support their decision to set up home rule leagues.
• Besant managed to convince the Congress to pledge to educative propaganda and the establishing of local-level committees. It was also agreed upon that if these conditions were not satisfied by September 1916, she would be free to set up a home rule league.
• Accordingly, she set up her Home Rule League in September 1916.
• Tilak, however, was not bound by any such condition and so had set up his league in April 1916.
• There were two home rule leagues launched.
• Tilak launched the Indian Home Rule League in April 1916 at Belgaum.
• Annie Besant launched the Home Rule League in September 1916 at Madras.
• They had the common objective of achieving self-government in India.
• There was an informal understanding between both the leagues wherein Tilak’s league worked in Maharashtra (except Bombay), Karnataka, Berar and the Central Provinces. Besant’s league worked in the rest of the country.
• Tilak’s league had its headquarters in Delhi. It had 6 branches. Besant’s league had 200 branches and was a looser organisation compared to Tilak’s.
• The two leagues worked closely with one another. However, they did not merge to avoid friction between both the leaders.
• To achieve self-government in India.
• To promote political education and discussion to set up agitation for self-government.
• To build confidence among Indians to speak against the government’s suppression.
• To demand a larger political representation for Indians from the British government.
• To revive political activity in India while maintaining the principles of the Congress Party.
• The leagues organised demonstrations and agitations.
• There were public meetings in which the leaders gave fiery speeches.
• They were able to create a stir within the country and alarm the British to such an extent that Annie Besant was arrested in June 1917.
• This move by the British created a nation-wide protest and now even moderate leaders joined the league. Besant was released in September 1917.
• The Home Rule League functioned throughout the year as opposed to the Congress Party whose activities were confined to once a year.
• The movement was able to garner huge support from a lot of educated Indians. In 1917, the two leagues combined had around 40,000 members.
• Many members of the Congress and the Muslim League joined the league. Many prominent leaders like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Joseph Baptista, G S Kharpade and Sir S Subramanya Iyer were among its members.
• The moderates, extremists and the Muslim League were briefly united through this movement.
• The movement was able to spread political consciousness to more regions in the country.
• This movement led to the Montague Declaration of 1917 in which it was declared that there would be more Indians in the government leading to the development of self-governing institutions ultimately realising responsible governments in India. This Declaration (also known as August Declaration) implied that the demand for home rule would no longer be considered seditious . This was the biggest significance of the movement.
• The movement was not a mass movement. It was restricted to educated people and college students.
• The leagues did not find a lot of support among Muslims, Anglo-Indians and non-Brahmins from Southern India as they thought home rule would mean a rule of the upper caste Hindu majority.
• Many of the moderates were satisfied with the government’s assurance of reforms (as preluded in the Montague Declaration). They did not take the movement further.
• Annie Besant kept oscillating between being satisfied with the government talk of reforms and pushing the home rule movement forward. She was not able to provide firm leadership to her followers. (Although ultimately she did call the reforms ‘unworthy of Indian acceptance’).
• In September 1918, Tilak went to England to pursue a libel case against Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, British journalist and author of the book ‘Indian Unrest’. The book contained deprecatory comments and had called Tilak the ‘Father of Indian Unrest.’ (Tilak lost the case).
• Tilak’s absence and Besant’s inability to lead the people led to the movement’s fizzing out.
• After the war, Mahatma Gandhi gained prominence as a leader of the masses and the Home Rule Leagues merged with the Congress Party in 1920.

FAQ about Home Rule Movement

From where was the term home rule borrowed/inspired, what is the name change for all india home rule league.

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29 Home Rule and its Enemies

Matthew Kelly, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Southampton.

• Published: 16 December 2013
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This chapter provides an anatomy of Home Rule politics in Britain and Ireland between the 1870s and the 1916 Rising. Home Rule’s ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’—nationalist, unionist, Irish, and British—are identified and the careers and thinking of the major protagonists are introduced. A national and an international context is provided and this allows Home Rule’s changing meanings over time to be explained. In particular, the development of Home Rule politics is considered in the context of the gradual democratization of UK politics and changing attitudes towards the British Empire. The findings of the recent monograph literature are integrated into this account and the main lines of historiographical dispute are evaluated. Particular emphasis is placed on the tendency of new liberal idealist thinking to regard Irish and British supporters of Home Rule as motivated more by principle than political calculation; a claim that can also be made of their opponents.

I. Contexts

Irish political history decisively entered a new phase in the early 1870s when the Home Rule idea began to be discussed. Home Rule dominated Irish politics until the First World War, generating a remarkably cohesive nationalist movement under the successive leaderships of Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell, Justin McCarthy, and John Redmond. Periodically, Home Rule was also the dominant question in British politics: Liberal support for Home Rule and Conservative opposition did more to define party political identity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain than any other single issue.

Convinced Home Rulers did not seek Ireland’s secession from the Union or complete separation, possibly under a republican system of government. Nor did Home Rulers demand the repeal of the Act of Union, which would create an Irish parliament under the Crown, parallel rather than subservient to the Westminster parliament. Instead, Home Rule prospected a form of devolved government within the Union, which would see Westminster voluntarily devolve certain responsibilities to an Irish executive formed from, and answerable to, an elected Irish parliament. In theory, the British government could use the legislative process to reverse or extend such act(s). Home Rule represented a more modest form of Irish self-government than Fenian separatism or O’Connellite repeal: successfully implemented, it would leave the Union intact with British sovereignty over Ireland uncompromised.

To understand the ramifications of Home Rule correctly, the constitutional context must be grasped. The Act of Union (1800) created a new state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It did not absorb Ireland into Britain, and Ireland was never a part of Britain, as the name of the state then and today indicates. Instead, the Union unified the British and Irish parliaments, translating the Irish component from College Green to Westminster. In doing so, the Union created a peculiar form of British government. Ireland was not governed through empowered local elites, as was the norm in Britain, but through an executive appointed by the government and based at Dublin Castle. Highly centralized, this was emphatically a form of imperial government, maintained by a mixture of state patronage and force. 1 Home Rule sought to replace ‘Castle’ government with a form of government accountable to an assembly representative of Irish public opinion. Technically, opposition to Home Rule was Unionist because it favoured the continuing unity of the Irish and British parliaments; polemically, Irish Unionists represented Home Rule as a revolutionary threat to the British-Irish connection.

The political logic of the Home Rule demand made it a form of constitutional nationalism wedded to a parliamentary political strategy. Under the leadership of Home Rule’s principal originator, Isaac Butt, an Irish Protestant Tory, the party did not aim to become a mass-based or democratic organization, but an association of like-minded gentlemen M.P.s. Butt defined Home Rule in terms intended to appeal to Irish Protestant and British public opinion and he believed that the achievement of Home Rule would satisfactorily reconcile Irish nationality to the British Empire. The Home Rule idea achieved full coherence only when framed in an imperial context. Orthodox Home Rulers were convinced that to so reconstitute British-Irish relations represented not a pragmatic political compromise but the best possible outcome for Ireland. As such, they were no less idealistic than their separatist critics and, barring the ambiguous decade-long Parnellite interlude, they dominated the leadership of the Home Rule party throughout its fifty-year history.

The campaign’s primary organizational manifestation was the Irish Parliamentary Party, which after 1879 nurtured and largely dominated a succession of subsidiary mass membership organizations such as the Land League, the Irish National League, the United Irish League, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Party also had close links with partner organizations in the United States and the British Dominions, which were an important source of party income. Despite this, orthodox Home Rule thinking never achieved a comfortable ascendancy over the Home Rule movement. Many supporters, among them leading activists, either expressed their support for Home Rule in ambiguous terms, blurring the distinction between Home Rule and separation, leaving their ultimate aims obscure, or they participated in political organizations or campaigns, particularly focused on agrarian politics, which encouraged a rhetorical separatism and non-lawful political activism. Semi-autonomous, grass-roots activism was always a component of Home Rule politics, periodically energizing the movement while at the same time undermining the ability of the leadership to determine its meaning. After 1880, most Irish nationalists, often including those with Fenian antecedents or connections, identified as Home Rulers to some degree or another, enjoying the unity the term’s ambiguity allowed.

British supporters, however, endeavoured to define Home Rule and were keen to emphasize its precise lineaments in order to demonstrate the moderate and workable nature of the demand. The most important exercises in definition were the three Liberal Home Rule Bills placed before the House of Commons in 1886, 1893, and 1912. In contrast to the superficial clarity of O’Connellite repeal and Fenian separatism, Home Rule only took on clear meaning through the legislative process and the three bills revealed the extent to which a succession of Liberal governments believed Ireland should be self-governing. 2 As such, the appeal of Home Rule to British Liberals lay in the degree to which it allowed them to calibrate Irish self-government according to their sense of Ireland’s fitness to receive this privilege.

As a consequence, although the relationship between Irish Home Rulers and their British sponsors could seem, as it was termed in the late 1880s, a Union of Hearts, the reception of the proposed settlements by Irish Home Rulers were shaped by rituals of scepticism and dissatisfaction. A Home Rule Bill which seemed equal to the expectations fostered by the Home Rule party was scarcely conceivable, while the accompanying parliamentary process, mired in detailed discussion of individual clauses and dogged by financial questions, could hardly write the exultant final chapter demanded by popular nationalist narratives of ‘the Story of Ireland’. 3

II. Irish Friends

Isaac Butt, in the 1830s and 40s one of the ‘Orange Young Irelanders’ of the Dublin University Magazine and, from 1836, Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin, was a harsh critic of British policy in Ireland. Butt condemned its centralizing tendencies and failure to address comprehensively the land and education questions to the satisfaction of the Irish majority. 4 Consequently, he saw Fenianism as symptomatic of the British misgovernment of Ireland and it was on this basis that he was willing to act for the defence in the Fenian trials of the late 1860s. Despite his populist touch, Butt believed not only that Home Rule would reconcile Irish nationalism to the realities of the British power, but that it would also help bring about the kind of Ireland he desired. And it was this Ireland that would prove the undoing of Butt’s conception of Home Rule. As a Tory who saw the vote as a privilege, he looked to create a system of self-government for Ireland which would restore traditional social hierarchies, returning the landed and professional elite—Protestant and Catholic—to their proper places as the natural leaders of society. Butt believed that Castle government both denied Ireland its right to self-government and created an unhealthy dependency culture in which the privileged were not required to exercise their responsibilities. Home Rule, Butt hoped, would stymie the development of a more popular radical politics, rendering Fenianism impotent in the face of a benevolent patrician politics.

In practice, it was Home Rule that had to come to terms with the popular political impulses roused by Fenianism. 5 In the early 1870s, the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood agreed to suspend its revolutionary activities in order to give the Home Rule movement a chance to prove its efficacy and compatibility with its ideological integrity. Unconvinced that either condition was fulfilled, in 1877 the Supreme Council forbade further Fenian cooperation with the movement. However, just as Butt found that the popular activism released by Fenianism would not be subdued, so many republicans found Home Rule party politics a congenial substitute for revolutionary plotting. John O’Connor Power and J. G. Biggar, both prominent IRB members and now M.P.s, refused to submit to the Supreme Council’s authority and were expelled from the Brotherhood. As significant as the Irish liberals and conservatives, who opportunistically aligned themselves with Home Rule during its break-through general election of 1874, 6 were the IRB men who were elected as Home Rule M.P.s and the many more who worked for the movement despite the Supreme Council’s opposition. 7 Butt may have been the most effective articulator of the Home Rule idea, but he did not represent the emergent Home Rule rank and file.

A more convincing representative of these popular passions was Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell was also a Protestant but, in sharp contrast to Butt’s political trajectory, his entry into parliament in 1875 was sponsored by a small group of radical nationalists. 8 Once in parliament, Parnell immediately associated with Biggar and the other obstructionists who disrupted parliamentary proceedings in order to heighten Home Rule’s profile and give voice to their principled objection to British imperial policy. 9 Parnell’s famous denial in parliament that the Manchester Martyrs had committed ‘murder’ brought him to the notice of the Fenian-influenced Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, who in 1878 replaced Butt with Parnell as their president. Also observing Parnell, this time from afar, was John Devoy, Irish-American leader of the republican Clan na Gael. Devoy came to believe that Parnell could provide the figurehead for a form of Home Rule politics whose vigour was compatible with his republican ideals. On 24 October, he sent a telegram, simultaneously published in the Irish-American press, which laid out the conditions the Home Rule movement must meet if it were to attract republican cooperation. Often described as marking a New Departure in Irish nationalist politics, it stated:

Nationalists here will support you on [the] following conditions: (1) abandonment of the federal demand [and] substitution [of] general declaration in favour of self-government; (2) vigorous agitation of land question on basis of peasant proprietary, while accepting conditions tending to abolish arbitrary eviction; (3) exclusion of all sectarian issues from platform; (4) [Irish] members to vote together on all imperial and home questions, adopt aggressive policy, and energetically resist all coercive legislation; (5) advocacy of all struggling nationalities in British empire and elsewhere. 10

Parnell did not find it necessary to agree explicitly to Devoy’s terms, though there would be considerable congruency between them and Parnell’s future leadership of the movement.

If Devoy’s telegram provided separatist ideologues cover for their work for the Home Rule movement, of greater significance was Parnell’s decision in 1879 to adopt the cause of the Land League. As T.W. Moody argued in a classic thesis, the alignment of the socio-economic interests of the Irish tenantry, in the West of Ireland facing renewed distress, with this new nationalism marked a more significant New Departure. 11 The old demand for the three Fs—fair rents, fixity of tenure, the right to free sale—proved a more popular rallying cry than Devoy’s strictures, and the creation of the Land League, under the presidency of the former Fenian, ex-convict, and radical Michael Davitt, triggered a period of intensive agrarian agitation against landlordism. Land League methods included official actions such as organized boycott, rent strike, and collective resistance to eviction, as well as acts of violent intimidation such as sending threatening letters, maiming livestock, and shootings. The government’s response was two-pronged. Vigorous coercive measures, including the selective suspension of habeas corpus (which saw certain districts ‘proclaimed’), were married to reforming legislation, notably the 1881 Land Act which guaranteed the three Fs.

By the winter of 1881/2, Parnell and much of the Land League leadership were in Kilmainham Jail and Ireland was often described as being in a state of anarchy. Alarmed by what he had helped unleash, Parnell let it be understood that, if released from jail, he would wind up the agitation and commit the movement to purely constitutional methods. The so-called ‘Kilmainham Treaty’, later criticized by Davitt as a counter-revolutionary betrayal of the Land War’s radical potential, led to the release of Parnell and his colleagues in May 1882. 12 A day or two later, the new Chief Secretary of Ireland and the Under Secretary were murdered in Phoenix Park by a group of renegade separatists known as the Invincibles. This momentarily undermined Parnell’s legendary poise and he offered his resignation, regarding the murders as having ruthlessly exposed the limitations of his authority. Gladstone insisted that Parnell stay on and such was the shock at these grisly murders throughout Ireland that they inadvertently strengthened Parnell’s position, heightening the appeal of constitutional methods.

Thereafter, Parnell proved reluctant to countenance agrarian agitation and distanced himself from the Fenians: John O’Leary’s dictum, that to succeed in Irish politics a leader needed either the support of the Fenians or the Catholic Church, carries more than a grain of truth for, as Parnell pulled back from the radicalism that had brought him to the leadership of the movement, he drew closer to the Church. By October 1884, the Party and the Church had reached a concordat, the Church satisfied that the Party could be relied upon to promote their educational interests at Westminster. Despite this, throughout the 1880s Parnell kept the radicals in view, peppering his speeches with suggestive phrases such as ‘no man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation’. His coalition, loose and unstable, was in place.

Parnell’s career ended in spectacular failure. Exposed as an adulterer in late 1890, Gladstone and the Catholic Church both indicated that they would no longer back his leadership. Determined to hang on—some say wounded vanity drove him on, others that he wanted to avoid the Home Rule movement becoming excessively confessional—Parnell led a minority of loyal Home Rule M.P.s in a nine-month battle that culminated in his premature death in October 1891. 13 Thanks to his pandering to Fenian sentiment (the so-called ‘appeal to the hillside men’), Parnell attracted the support of Dublin and much radical and urban opinion, but as the three by-elections of those months demonstrated, he did not have the support of the enfranchised Catholic electors of rural Ireland. Parnell’s Dublin funeral, the most important public event of late nineteenth-century Ireland, symbolically repudiated all talk of recon ciliation. John Redmond, Parnell’s successor as leader of a minority of loyal M.P.s, was bequeathed a difficult legacy, his political survival dependent on maintaining a Redmondite-Fenian nexus. 14

The circumstances which saw Parnellites and anti-Parnellites reunited under Redmond’s leadership in 1900 were very different. Gladstonian hopes had been suppressed by a long period of Conservative government that saw no prospect of a Home Rule Bill. As a consequence, the Party ceased to be a vehicle for popular political participation and donations dried up. 15 By contrast, grass-roots radicalism revived. Most significantly, William O’Brien established the United Irish League in 1898 and led a new land agitation, while the separatists organized the 1798 centenary commemoration movement, led opposition to the Boer War (1899–1902) and the royal visits of 1900 and 1903, and embarked on an anti-recruiting campaign. 16 Despite the Party’s organizational weakness, Redmond and other Home Rulers retained considerable personal authority and they proved adept at exploiting or aligning themselves with these new initiatives. Consequently, constitutionalists dominated proceedings at the major ’98 events and, through vigorous parliamentary interventions, made their opposition to the Boer War clear, reminding the Liberals of their shared opposition to Tory foreign policy adventurism.

Most remarkable, however, was the continued capacity of the party to mobilize itself against agrarian radicalism and separatist enthusiasm. In the first years of the new century, the United Irish League and the emerging Catholic-nationalist Ancient Order of Hibernians were tamed, both brought firmly within the Home Rule fold, while the neo-Fenianism of the ’98 organizations that would feed the new Sinn Féin movement were firmly marginalized: Party activists fulminated against factionists driven by fanciful ideas who were determined to divide the national movement. With some justification, the Party’s reunification and reassertion of its authority has been seen as reflecting the vested interests of middle class Catholics and their clerical allies. 17 Of equal importance was the simple fact that the prospect of the Liberals returning to power promised to demonstrate the continuing efficacy of the parliamentary strategy. Over the longer term, the specific lineaments of Redmondite politics became clear. It meant Empire loyalty and the conciliation of moderate southern landlords, as emphasized by Paul Bew, but also, as James McConnel shows, a thoroughgoing commitment to political centralism and hostility to localism, socialism, and monocultural Gaelicism. 18

III. British Friends

Indisputably, the most important British friend of Home Rule was William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister 1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, and 1892–4. His decision in December 1885 to fly the ‘Hawarden Kite’, which signalled that he intended to place a Home Rule Bill before the House of Commons, transformed British-Irish political relations. The importance of this stemmed not merely from its political ramifications, but from the justification Gladstone increasingly provided for his decision. If, on the one hand, he emphasized Irish readiness for self-government, with all that this implied about the right of Britain to make this decision, on the other, he made it clear that his commitment reflected his conviction that the means by which the Act of Union had been brought about were ‘unspeakably criminal’. 19 This represented an extraordinary concession not only to the Irish Parliamentary Party but to Irish nationalism in general. The greatest British politician of the age had become more than a convert to Home Rule for Ireland; he had come to see the British connection as Irish nationalists did.

Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill provoked a split in the Liberal Party and it was defeated in the House of Commons, precipitating a new election which the Conservatives decisively won. When Gladstone returned to office in 1892, elected on a Home Rule platform, he could be sure the bill would pass relatively smoothly through the Commons but could only hope that the Lords would recognize the electoral mandate which Home Rule had attracted. When the Lords threw the bill out, Gladstone went into retirement. Lord Rosebery took over the Liberal leadership and in 1895 the British electorate returned the Conservatives to office. Resolutely anti-Home Rule Conservative governments followed, until the Liberals returned to power in 1906.

Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill outlined a system of devolved parliamentary government for Ireland in which two ‘orders’ would sit together in the same chamber. The first order would be composed of M.P.s elected under the existing householder franchise (as established by the 1884 Reform Act). The second order comprised the Irish peerage and a number of elected senators, men of property who would be returned through a more restricted £25 franchise. The two orders would sit together, each having the power of veto and the right to vote separately if so desired. Gladstone hoped this system would have the effect of elevating the Irish peerage in the eyes of the people, reviving respect for the ‘natural rulers of Ireland’ and diminishing ‘the influence of nationalist agitators and ultramontane priests’. 20

Under Home Rule, Westminster would retain control over policing, military defence, foreign affairs, and commerce, this last denying the Irish full control over trade policy and the sensitive question of tariffs. Crucially, under the first bill there would be no representation of Irish M.P.s at Westminster, raising the spectre of taxation without representation. Parnell later admitted to Cecil Rhodes that this ‘exclusion may have given some colour to the accusations so freely made against the bill that it had a separatist tendency’. 21 The 1893 bill broadly adhered to the provisions of the first bill as regards Irish control over domestic matters, but it retained Irish representation at Westminster and proposed an Irish parliament consisting of two houses. The lower house would consist of the 103 M.P.s elected on the present franchise and the upper house would be composed of forty-eight members elected by voters, who owned or occupied land with an annual valuation of £200 or more.

The question of whether Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule was motivated by ‘Irish ideas’, according to which he had famously declared his intention to govern Ireland on first taking office in 1868, was the subject of immediate political controversy and much subsequent historiographical debate. The Tories accused Gladstone of opportunism, and it is indisputable that, by securing the support of the Irish Home Rule M.P.s, he was propelled into office in January 1886. More subtle is the proposition that Gladstone was motivated by what he perceived to be the needs of the Liberal party. Increasingly divided as it was between radicals headed by Joseph Chamberlain and Whigs associated with Lord Hartington, Gladstone came to believe that the integrity of the party and a proper conception of liberalism depended upon the maintenance of his leadership. A big bill predicated on sound liberal principles would restore unity to a fissiparous party threatened by the rising tide of ‘Tory democracy’. 22 Cooke and Vincent, in the most ingenious reading of Gladstone’s actions in 1886, infer a greater level of calculation still, suggesting that Gladstone intended to use the Home Rule Bill as cover for the passage of a Land Purchase Bill. They argue that Home Rule was intended to fail, whereas Land Purchase was to go through, providing the means by which the Land Question, the fundamental source of Ireland’s ills, would be answered. By creating a nation of contented peasant proprietors, the demand for self-government would be exposed as symptomatic of socio-economic discontent rather than a more profound drive for national self-government. 23

Although the explosive circumstances of 1885/6 cannot but fascinate the political historian, such narrowly ‘high political’ interpretations are now generally rejected. Also found wanting is the hagiographical view that Gladstone’s commitment was predicated purely on his peculiar capacity to realize that Home Rule would deliver ‘justice for Ireland’. 24 Gladstone’s personal authority was certainly central to the acceptance of Home Rule by the ‘non-conformist conscience’ troubled by the Catholicity of Irish nationalism, 25 but recent work suggests this should be considered alongside what J.P. Parry describes as the ‘deeper rhythms of Liberal politics’. 26 Parry and Eugenio Biagini are exponents of what might be considered the liberal idealist school of British historiography. 27 Both emphasize the way in which Home Rule came to be seen by some Liberals as the ideologically sound solution to the Irish Question, the only genuinely democratic and liberal alternative to coercion. 28 By their readings, Home Rule, whether intended to fulfil a nationalist agenda or deliver a just extension of local government, had had currency among liberals, particularly radicals, since the 1870s. Gladstone did not so much spring Home Rule on credulous Liberals innocent of the idea as place it unexpectedly at the top of the Liberal agenda. 29 Indeed, Biagini contends that an ‘elective affinity’ rooted in an anti-jingoistic, democratic politics had developed between British liberalism and Irish nationalism in the late 1870s. Stephen Ball complicates the picture, noting that the signals coming from Ireland indicated the possibility of the development of a more significant Irish separatist movement that could be forestalled by a significant act of devolution. 30 If the political and ideological intricacies of Gladstonian manoeuvre continue to perplex, it is nonetheless clear that mainstream British liberals took the view that the Irish Question was a British problem to be settled within the confines of the Union.

At the level of liberal political discourse things were clearer. If the democratic rights of the Irish people did not extend to secession, the democratic logic of the 1884–5 Reform and Redistribution of Seats Acts provided a powerful component of pro-Home Rule Liberal polemic. 31 As Gladstone argued after the 1886 defeat, the overwhelming support for Home Rule by the Irish electorate in the 1885 general election indicated that the ‘settled opinion’ of the Irish people was in favour of Home Rule. Allied to this was the view that the Irish, as a nation, comprised a distinct democratic unit within the United Kingdom. Its legitimate needs could only be met if the UK’s non-Irish majority fulfilled its moral obligation to respond positively to these democratically expressed demands, overcoming a politics predicated on a crude parliamentary majoritarianism. Moreover, although Gladstone did not take Fenianism’s separatism seriously, he judged its ‘intensity’ as symptomatic of legitimate socio-economic grievances. By contrast, the demand for Home Rule was legitimized by its apparently moderate, reasonable, and liberal characteristics. 32 Such thinking reflected the belief widespread among Britons that they were peculiarly favoured by Providence, forming the world’s greatest, most progressive, and most fortunate nation. The logic that flowed from this premise was simple: a politics predicated on secession could only be the politics of a people ill-equipped for self-government, whereas a politics that sought to improve the system in a manner compatible with liberal principles must have reason and justice on its side. In sum, Liberal supporters of Home Rule recognized that Ireland was a distinct nation with distinct national rights and Home Rule represented an attempt not to subordinate but to align these rights with British interests. Liberal Home Rule reflected the limitations Britain imposed upon Ireland’s right to self-determination. Rather than anticipating an Ireland governed according to ‘Irish ideas’, Gladstonian Home Rule sought to engineer an answer to the Irish Question rooted in British liberal ideas.

IV. British Enemies

It is all too easy to denounce British opponents of Home Rule as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, as men and women who allowed sectarian prejudice, often expressed with a racist inflection, to dictate their politics. As Michael Bentley put it, as Tory opposition to Home Rule developed, ‘Irish space became as distinct as Indian, as foreign, as colonial, as unpleasant ’. 33 In addition, Home Rule’s Tory opposition stands accused of defending the Union by encouraging loyalist extremism, seemingly licencing political violence and resistance to the Crown authorities. In one of the most notorious speeches given by a Conservative politician in response to Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill, Lord Randolph Churchill told an audience at the Ulster Hall, Belfast, on 22 February 1886, that they might find themselves having to act outside ‘the lines of what we are accustomed to look upon as constitutional action’. 34 Churchill’s words came at the end of a speech which had emphasized the shared history of religious struggle by Protestants on both sides of the Irish Sea, asserting that their English brethren would never betray their Ulster fellow Protestants. Several months later, Churchill used a phrase that would go down in history, telling a Scottish Liberal Unionist in a public letter that ‘Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right’. 35 Bentley again provides a pithy summary: ‘Once in place, “Irish” politics became a Tory language of resistance neither more or less’. 36

Churchill’s words were more carefully pitched than these isolated quotations suggest and his manner recalled Parnell’s oratorical techniques, saying enough to imply that there were foreseeable circumstances in which the use of force would be justified. Lord Salisbury (prime minister 1886–1892, 1895–1902) was more provoking still. On 10 May 1886, in one of the most notorious political speeches of the period, he compared the Irish in racially disparaging terms to Hottentots and Orientals, suggesting that ‘self-government…works admirably well when it is confided to the Teutonic race, but it does not work so well when people of other races are called upon to join in it’. Salisbury seemed to suggest that his answer to the Irish Question was coercion and mass emigration or, as John Morley memorably paraphrased it, ‘manacles and Manitoba’. 37

According to his biographer, the most notable section of Salisbury’s major speech in opposition to Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill emphasized that thirty-eight Home Rule M.P.s had at one time or another been described by judges as being associated with organizations that mutilated cattle, withheld rents, and even murdered people. 38 The association of Parnellism with crime and the idea that the Irish were ‘assassins’ proved one of the most emotionally powerful aspects of British opposition to Home Rule, but it did not serve merely to confirm pre-existing prejudices. As news of the violence of the Land War came to dominate the press in 1879–82, A.V. Dicey, the eminent liberal jurist, went from being favourably disposed to staunchly opposed to Home Rule, believing Ireland’s nationalist leadership had comprehensively demonstrated that they were unsuited to self-government. 39 In contrast to the Liberal view that Irish nationalists would learn how to act responsibly when faced with the realities of government, 40 Dicey believed the Land War proved that Irish self-government would prove disastrous. 41 In a string of writings throughout the 1880s and 1890s, he deployed his considerable intellectual powers to make ‘England’s Case Against Home Rule’. In essence, he argued that a minority sub-group (the Irish) had no right to dictate to the majority group (the English) a set of changes which would have the effect of ‘revolutionizing the constitution of the whole United Kingdom’. 42 More than this, Dicey ruthlessly exposed the calculated obfuscations which underpinned the Home Rule campaign, arguing no less insistently than the orthodox separatists that ‘A bona fide Home Ruler cannot be a bona fide Nationalist’. 43

There can be little doubt that many British Unionists shared an affinity for Irish Unionism as a Protestant people under siege, their hard-won liberties apparently threatened by Catholic Ireland. As Salisbury put it, the securities offered by Gladstone’s bills were no more than ‘paper barricades’ that would prove ineffectual as Dublin gradually assumed full independence. Home Rule would not answer the Irish Question for—again in Salisbury’s words—there was ‘no middle term between government at Westminster and independent and separate government at Dublin’. 44 Moreover, nationalism carried more than a whiff of a more socially radical politics, challenging the rights of property that all mainstream British politicians believed were the basis of a properly ordered society.

And yet, if in office the Liberals pursued the headline-grabbing political panacea of Home Rule, the Conservative record in Ireland was more substantial. Between 1885 and 1903, they passed legislation which accumulatively created a peasant proprietorship and democratized Irish local government, measures that radically reduced the social, economic, and political power of the old Unionist elite. Ireland’s infrastructure was also improved, with harbour walls strengthened and light railways built, and agencies were established to enhance Ireland’s economic potential, notably the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. When, in 1906, the Liberals were returned to power after twelve years of Tory government, Ireland was more economically dynamic and more politically democratic than at any time in the period of the Union.

None of this was inevitable and explaining this ‘constructive unionism’—in Gerald Balfour’s famous phrase, the attempt to ‘kill home rule with kindness’—is not straightforward. Notwithstanding the intensity of his racial rhetoric in 1886, Salisbury consistently believed that Ireland’s problems were material and he thought Ireland would benefit from a widening of the ‘base of property’. 45 Similar thinking motivated Irish Chief Secretaries such as Arthur Balfour (1887–1891), Gerald Balfour (1895–1900), and George Wyndham (1900–05); also important was the presence in the Salisbury coalition of Liberal Unionists, often of a Chamberlainite turn of mind. They shared many commonplace anti-Irish prejudices, not least in seeing the Irish as ‘childish’, which description they applied almost as readily to Unionists as Nationalists. 46 Nonetheless, Chamberlain’s radical defence of the Union was predicated on the notion that ‘if poverty was to be reduced by state intervention, then what Britain required was not devolution and the weakening of Parliament, but the rational reconstruction and empowerment of the imperial executive at its centre’. 47

G.K. Peatling argues that Unionist thinking fits into the broader context of late nineteenth-century imperial thinking. By the 1880s and 90s, the notion that large states and empires would break up along lines determined by ethnically based nationalisms, so powerfully influential in the 1850s and 60s, appeared outmoded. German unification and imperial expansion—the ‘scramble for Africa’—suggested history would favour large expansionist states that were sufficiently resolute when facing down challenges to their authority. The optimistic rationalism of the mid-Victorian period had given way to this more conflictual understanding of international politics, which was sometimes expressed in neo-Darwinian terms. Consequently, although Conservative thinking was disturbed in the early twentieth century by debates about the possibility of a federal future for the British Empire, stimulated in part by the grind of the South African War, generally speaking the prospect of Home Rule for Ireland appeared to endanger the fundamentals of Britain’s global imperial ascendancy. 48 Indeed, Irish separatists and British Unionists alike maintained that Irish independence would begin the unravelling of the Empire: Unionists frequently asked how they could hope to retain control of India once it became clear that they could not hold Ireland, whereas separatists saw Home Rule as an attempt to stave off imperial dissolution. 49 Consequently, although there were circumstances in which British Unionists might grant the five million people of Ireland self-government, such an experiment could not be chanced if it might threaten the capacity of London to determine the British Empire’s future.

V. Irish Enemies

Irish enemies of Home Rule fell into two main categories, Irish Unionists and Irish separatists.

Unionism was a political form of the broader phenomenon of Loyalism. Loyalism was a Protestant political creed that professed allegiance to the Crown and the permanency of the Protestant Act of Settlement (1701). 50 Unionism emerged from within Loyalism as a form of organized political opposition to Home Rule. At first glance, Unionism is a misnomer, signifying a political identity predicated on the false claim that orthodox Home Rulers sought to undo rather than recalibrate the Union. However, a fundamental feature of Unionist politics was the notion, sometimes sincerely held, sometimes deployed for political effect, that Home Rule was a Trojan horse for separation. Home Rule, Unionists insisted, was the latest Nationalist synonym for either separation, repeal, or Rome Rule. In effect, Unionists claimed that Irish nationalists were not nationalists at all but Romanists eager to hand the country over to the dictates of the Vatican. For example, Unionists claimed the violent hostility in the 1890s that greeted Protestant street preachers in southern Irish towns presaged the realities of a Home Rule Ireland, 51 while the Ulster feminist Isabella Tod feared that, if Ireland fell under a form of Catholic rule, women would be kept ‘down permanently’. 52 Also apparently threatened was Ulster’s dynamic industrial economy. Devolution risked a Dublin government disadvantaging Ulster’s booming linen and shipbuilding industries by imposing tariffs thought to be in the interest of the country as a whole. Finally, Home Rule was projected as a humiliation, demoting Ireland from a partner state of the imperial power to a colony. The accumulated effect of these fears saw the Unionists re-imagine the Act of Union as the guarantor of the fundamental rights and liberties of the Irish Protestant just as the Irish nationalists had a tendency to imagine Home Rule as the solution to all their problems.

If British proponents or opponents of Home Rule made their case broadly in terms of British ideas, so Irish Unionism was fundamentally Irish. Unionists opposed Home Rule less because they were worried it would endanger British India than because they feared it would deliver government by Catholic Ireland. Such hostility was generalized, stemming from a political identity forged by the violent religious political conflict of the seventeenth century, the memory of which was sustained by the rituals of loyalist associationalism, and was highly personalized. Like the Tories, Irish Unionists were repulsed by the criminality and anarchy brought by the Land War and threatened by the Irish National League. Many Unionists loathed Parnell and his lieutenants, repelled by men they associated with the anarchy of the winter of 1881–2 and the Phoenix Park murders.

Unionists can be classified in broadly socio-economic and geographical categories. First were the members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and gentry, formed of landowners and often Trinity College- or Oxbridge-educated members of the higher professions. This old elite was increasingly joined by an emergent Protestant middle class, notably the product of Ulster’s rapid industrial and commercial development in the nineteenth century but who were to be found in smaller numbers throughout the country. Finally, there were the Protestant working class and tenant farmers, both overwhelmingly concentrated in Ulster, but again present in significant numbers elsewhere in the country.

The concentration of the Protestant population in Ulster was of enormous political significance. For just as Home Rule was the nationalist politics of the new democracy, superseding the secret organization of the Fenians and the O’Connellite politics of the Catholic Whigs, so Unionism supplanted the old Irish loyalism of the elites with a democratic politics of the masses. As a consequence, the basis of Loyalist political power shifted, developing from an Irish Loyalism predicated on the shared interests of the landed elite throughout the British Isles to a distinct Ulster Unionism, rooted in an Ulster democracy projecting a specifically Ulster identity, which mirrored the cultural revivalism of late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. 53 As a consequence, the Loyalist elite came to terms with the fact that, if they were to mount an effective resistance to Home Rule while retaining something of their socio-political pre-eminence, they needed to align with the democratic Loyalism of the Protestant working class, notably the form of popular Protestant associationalism known as Orangeism, however prone to intense and sometimes violent displays of sectarianism.

These realignments should not be seen as the manipulation of the masses by the old elite. Orangeism had a vitality of its own and Ulster Protestant democracy had distinct economic interests, often at odds with those of the old elite. For example, some Protestant tenant farmers had joined the Land League, while in the late 1890s Russellism, a radical reformist Unionism, developed a distinctly Unionist threat to the entrenched socio-economic interests of the landed elite. 54 Although Unionism’s success was built on the successful integration of the Protestant classes, its capacity to present a united front was directly proportional to the degree of nationalist threat at any given moment.

Avatars of these general observations were the careers of the leading Unionists of the day. Colonel Edward Saunderson (1837–1906), in the 1870s an Ulster liberal and landlord, emerged as the leader of Irish parliamentary Unionism in the 1880s. Although his predominance reflected the ascendancy of Ulster Unionism within Unionism, he was dogged throughout his career by suspicions raised by his Liberal political origins. His declining authority in the 1890s, notwithstanding his personal inadequacies as a leader, reflected the passing of the immediate threat of Home Rule and his conservative stance on the Land Question and other social questions important to the Unionist rank and file. 55 Saunderson’s successors, Edward Carson (1854–1935) and James Craig (1871–1940), reflected the complexity of the Unionist coalition which confronted the third Home Rule Bill of 1912. Carson, a Trinity-educated Dublin barrister, represented the old Loyalist elite but could speak the language of popular Protestantism, whereas Craig, the Belfast-born son of a whiskey distiller, provided Ulster ballast to that Carsonian grandeur.

Unionist unity was facilitated by the reforms of the Conservative governments of 1895–1906, not least Wyndham’s Land Purchase Act of 1903, which apparently demonstrated that Unionism could deliver the reforms demanded by the grass roots. Constructive unionism did not wholly resolve the class tensions within Irish Unionism, but the Carson-Craig nexus was greatly eased by its ministrations.

Irish separatist opposition to Home Rule was predicated on the notion that British government in Ireland was a form of political despotism, whose local agents were an imperial settler class, their ‘West Briton’ accomplices to be found among Irish Catholics and state agents like the Royal Irish Constabulary and the courts. This power complex was reinforced by a deliberately nurtured sectarianism which succeeded in dividing the Irish people against themselves. Crucially, separatists rejected the idea that Ireland was a colony, arguing in rather more Victorian terms that Ireland was a nation under imperial rule. 56 Many Home Rulers agreed with this diagnosis, but whereas they believed devolution might legitimize the Union, separatists argued that the politics of devolution served to legitimize British power. Home Rule, the separatists maintained, would not reverse the conquest but would confirm Ireland in its servitude, seeing the representatives of the Irish people accede to a position in the British Empire. There is a peculiar congruency between this nationalist thinking and the Unionist idea that Home Rule would render Ireland a colony.

Separatist sentiment was not uncommon, but its political significance was undermined by the ability of the Home Rulers to blur ideological lines, presenting Home Rule as Fenianism by other means. Nonetheless, Irish Republican Brotherhood activity could be found throughout Ireland, not least in the Workmen’s Clubs, and in the 1880s a renewed separatist presence surfaced in Irish public life through cultural nationalist organizations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Young Ireland Societies, and various commemorative and friendly societies. Such advanced nationalist associations, with their secessionist tendencies, fed the 1798 centenary movement and stimulated wider pro-Boer sympathies during the second South African War (1899–1902). And while the significance of this activity should not be exaggerated—the police disparaged the separatists as marginal and socially insignificant—few Home Rule politicians could afford to ignore entirely the way separatist sentiment resonated with the wider population. Many platform orators, facing a rowdy outdoor crowd, found a little Fenian-speak went a long way.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the options for the aspirant separatist had expanded from Fenianism’s republicanism to include Sinn Féin’s ‘Dual Monarchism’. Arthur Griffith, Sinn Féin’s leading ideologue, rejected Fenianism’s republican absolutism, arguing that the 1782–3 complex of legislation which created Grattan’s parliament saw Ireland achieve full independence. Consequently, Griffith argued that Ireland need not embark on a foolhardy revolution, but should withdraw its representatives from parliament, set up an executive and assembly in Dublin, and assume the constitutional rights and liberties illegally confiscated by the British government through the Act of Union. In this way, Griffith advocated not the radical break with the past demanded by the republicans, but the restoration to Ireland of her constitutional rights. Griffith’s ’82ism attempted to find common ground between the strict constitutionalists of the Home Rule party and the revolutionism of the IRB. Famously drawing inspiration from the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867, Griffith’s argument carried echoes of O’Connellite repeal and Parnellite articulations of Home Rule, despite despising the former and distancing himself from the latter. Alhough, as the home ruler Tom Kettle put it, Sinn Féin had a ‘great capacity for getting itself talked about’’; its electoral achievements were limited to a clutch of local government seats won in 1907–8 and lost by 1912. 57

VI. The Ulster Crisis

The Liberal Party did not return to power in 1906 with any particular enthusiasm for Irish Home Rule. The Gladstonian commitment remained part of the party’s agenda, but thanks to a strong majority, more immediately pressing concerns and the passing of a full decade since last they enjoyed power, Home Rule had ceased to be British liberalism’s defining political question. The Home Rule Party had become an irritant and the Irish Councils Bill of 1908, which looked to strengthen Irish local government, was an attempt to neutralize the issue. Presented to the Home Rule Party as a reasonable compromise on their core demand, it provoked severe criticism in Ireland, reminding the Liberal and the Home Rule parties alike that Home Rule marked the extent of the compromise nationalists were willing to make. A similar outcry greeted Redmond’s claim to an American audience in 1910 that Home Rule represented no greater measure of self-government than the federal structure gave each US state. 58

It would take the greatest constitutional crisis of twentieth-century British politics to revive the half-dormant Liberal commitment to Home Rule. In 1909, Lloyd George presented a radical budget which, in defiance of all parliamentary tradition, was promptly thrown out by the House of Lords. In February 1910, the government went to the country, seeking a mandate for the budget. They were able to form a majority only owing to support from the Home Rule Party, yet still the Lords refused to bend to the will of the Commons. Now determined to win a clear mandate for the reform of the House of Lords, the government once more went to the country in December. The outcome again saw the Home Rule M.P.s hold the balance of power and Asquith committed his government to a new Home Rule Bill. Threatened with the creation of hundreds of Liberal peers, the Lords passed the Parliament Bill in August 1911. The removal of the Lords, power of veto over Commons legislation transformed the Irish Question, diminishing what seemed to be the principal obstruction to a Home Rule Bill. In April 1912, Asquith placed the third Home Rule Bill before the House of Commons.

The near certainty that a Home Rule Bill would pass into law saw the principal site of struggle pass from the Palace of Westminster to the towns and villages of Ireland. Ulster Unionism mobilized. On 28 September 1912, 471 414 Ulster men and women signed the Ulster League and Covenant, pledging to resist by force the implementation of Home Rule. On 31 January 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force was established and eventually presented British and Irish observers with a well-organized force of 85 000 men. Nationalist Ireland did not take this mobilization very seriously, largely retaining its faith in the parliamentary process. Michael Wheatley describes this as a period of nationalist apathy, with time marked as they waited to see what shape the long-promised Home Rule Bill would take once it had worked its way through the legislative process. 59 Nonetheless, separatists such as Patrick Pearse were excited by these developments. Irish Unionists drilling and carrying arms suggested that Unionists were shaking off their dependency on the British, which Pearse construed as their first step towards realizing their true destiny as a part of the Irish nation. 60

British politicians were less sanguine. The Liberal Party recognized that the UVF offered a real threat to law and order in Ireland, while the Conservatives stoked up Unionist defiance, arguing that the Liberals were abusing their power by threatening to use the Parliament Act to push through the Lords a bill for which they had no distinct mandate. Jeremy Smith suggests that much of this talk was ‘bluff and bluster’, arguing that the Conservative strategy was to prolong the crisis until the Liberals were forced to go to the country, at which point the electorate would reject the Liberals and Home Rule would be sidelined. 61 However, the growing possibility of separate treatment for Ulster—first raised in an amendment by a little-known backbencher in June 1912—finally roused nationalist Ireland. Loyalist mobilization could be airily dismissed as posturing but the possibility that this might lead to a Home Rule Bill that undermined the geographical integrity of Ireland could not be lightly shrugged off. Consequently, when the cultural nationalist Eoin MacNeill sounded the call in November 1913, many nationalists without formal connections to the separatist movement readily joined the Irish Volunteers. Although this mobilization was presented not as act of rebellion but as a form of republican virtue, aimed at upholding the law in the face of Unionist anarchy, the movement was strongly shaped by a new generation of separatists who were inspired by the senior Fenian Tom Clarke and read Irish Freedom , a new separatist newspaper. 62

Politicians on all sides were forced by the volunteering phenomenon to confront the fact that to impose a Home Rule settlement based on a unitary Dublin government would demand the massive coercion of Ulster. The so-called Curragh Mutiny of 20 March 1914 indicated that the army could not be relied upon, while the Larne gunrunning of 24–5 April suggested the UVF’s seriousness of intent. The army and the UVF can only have been encouraged by the widespread Unionist activism of the British League of Covenanters and the extremist British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union. 63 Nationalist events, such as the landing of guns at Howth on 26 July, which led to several civilians being shot dead by the police at Bachelor’s Walk in Dublin later that day, were as much separatist propaganda exercises aimed at the Home Rule leadership as threats to the Unionists or the British government. The violent threat that Unionism posed to any Home Rule settlement exposed horribly the act of faith that had underpinned Home Rule since it had abandoned Butt’s attempt to win Protestant Ireland over to the cause.

War broke out in August, and in September the government passed a Home Rule Act accompanied by a suspending motion, aiming to settle any outstanding difficulties and implement the Act at the end of the European conflict. Redmond immediately committed the Irish National Volunteers—now a force some 180 000 strong—to the war effort, pledging their service to ‘wherever the firing line extends’, a confident gesture reflecting the continuing vitality of Home Rule. 64 Only 10 000 separatists under the leadership of MacNeill seceded from the movement to form the Irish Volunteers. It was an IRB minority of this volunteer minority, with support from James Connolly’s socialist Irish Citizen Army, which occupied Dublin’s General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916 and declared an Irish republic. The rising was suppressed—the leadership faced a British firing squad some weeks later—and the British crackdown, which included the internment without trial of thousands of men, dramatically undermined Irish nationalist support for continuing attempts by Home Rule politicians, Unionists, and the government to reach an agreement on the implementation of the 1914 bill.

The decline of Home Rule is shadowed by bleak ironies. A sophisticated Redmondite Home Ruler like Stephen Gwynn had hoped that under Home Rule Irish nationalism would be reconciled to the British Empire and the Irish people to each other. 65 Yet, when Northern Ireland was carved out of Ulster and granted a form of Home Rule in 1920, the state created was predicated on the maintenance of Protestant ascendancy. Ultimately, thanks to a British government neglectful of its responsibilities, Home Rule did not deliver Ireland over to Rome but Northern Ireland over to Protestant rule. Unionists, it seems, had been correct about the weakness of the safeguards Home Rule legislation offered minorities living under its provisions. For Ireland’s remaining twenty-six counties, including the three Ulster counties excluded from Northern Ireland, a new set of constitutional arrangements inspired by the example of Britain’s imperial Dominions were drawn up. This created one of the most religiously homogenous societies in modern Europe and few twentieth-century European societies would so suffer the effects of religious authoritarianism as the Irish Free State and subsequent Irish Republic. Home Rulers, at their most open-minded and progressive, articulated their politics in terms of pluralism and toleration. They did not have a monopoly on these themes, as anticlerical Fenians and progressive Unionists would have been quick to point out. But irrespective of whether Home Rule would have secured the Union or Ireland’s secession, the failure of its adherents to undermine the religious determinants of mainstream Irish political identities was the people of Ireland’s loss, Protestant and Catholic alike.

1. David Fitzpatrick , ‘Ireland and Empire’ in Andrew Porter (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 494–9 .

2. Oliver MacDonagh , States of Mind. A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980 (London, 1983), 59–61 .

3. R.F. Foster , Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London, 2002), 19 .

4. The outstanding published work on Isaac Butt’s political ideas is Joseph Spence , ‘Isaac Butt and Irish nationality’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Defenders of the Union. A survey of British and Irish unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), 65–90 .

5. Marta Ramón , ‘National Brotherhoods and National Leagues: The IRB and its Constitutional Rivals during the 1860s’ in James McConnel and Fearghal McGarry , The Black Hand of Republicanism. Fenianism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), 18–33 .

6. David Thornley , Isaac Butt and Home Rule (London, 1964), 195–204 .

7. On the significance of this strain of Fenian influence in later years, see James McConnel , ‘Fenians at Westminster: the Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party and the legacy of the new departure’, Irish Historical Studies , 34:133 (May 2004), 42–64 .

8. In brief, see F. S. L. Lyons , Charles Stewart Parnell (Dublin, 1977, 2005), 35–9 . For detail, see Robert Kee , The Laurel and the Ivy. The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism (London, 1993), 50–76 .

9. For a pioneering assessment of this phase in the development of Home Rule politics, see Paul A. Townend , ‘Between Two World’s: Irish Nationalists and Imperial Crisis 1878–1880’, Past and Present , 194 (February 2007), 139–74 .

10. Quoted in T.M. Moody , Michael Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), 250 .

Moody, Davitt , 325–6.

12. Michael Davitt , The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London, 1904), 361–4 .

13. The positions of Paul Bew , Philip Bull , Frank Callanan , and F. L. Lyons are summarized in M.J. Kelly , The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 (Woodbridge, 2006), 41–2 .

14. Matthew Kelly , ‘“Parnell’s Old Brigade”: The Redmondite-Fenian nexus in the 1890s’, in Irish Historical Studies , 33:130 (November 2002), 209–32 .

15. F. L. Lyons , The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1890–1910 (1951) .

16. Philip Bull , Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996) ; Senia Pašeta , ‘Nationalist Responses to Two Royal Visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903’, in Irish Historical Studies , 31:124 (November 1999), 488–504 ; Terence Denman , ‘“The Red Livery of Shame”: The Campaign Against Army Recruitment in Ireland, 1899–1914’ in I.H.S. , 29:114 (November 1994), 208–33 .

Fergal McCluskey, ‘A Period of Nationalist Flux: The IRB and the Growth of Devlinite Nationalism in East Tyrone, 1902–7’ in McConnel and McGarry, Black Hand of Republicanism , 86–104.

18. Paul Bew , Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987) and James McConnel , The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Third Home Rule Crisis (Dublin, 2013) .

W.E. Gladstone, Special Aspects of the Irish Question (1886) , 9.

20. As summarized in Jonathan Parry , The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (Yale, 1993), 296 .

Parnell to Rhodes, 23 June 1888 (NLI MS. 41,788/1–9). It was an admission that earned the Home Rule Party a £10 000 donation.

22. D.A. Hamer , Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972), 104–12 .

23. A.B. Cooke and John Vincent , The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Hassocks, 1974), 54–6 .

24. J.L. Hammond , Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938) , ix: ‘The more his career is examined, the higher will his reputation stand, for the clearer will it be that his great struggle for Ireland’s freedom was unmixed with any personal ambitions of his own.’

25. D.W. Bebbington , The Nonconformist Conscience. Chapel and Politics 1870–1914 (London, 1982), 85–7 .

26. J.P. Parry , The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), 27 .

27. Eugenio Biagini , British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007) .

28. H.C. G. Matthew emphasized that Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule was part of an evolution in his thinking, which did not involve an ‘inward struggle’ or the ‘resolution of contending tensions’. See his Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), 464 ff .

29. T.A. Jenkins , Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988), 277–8 .

30. Stephen Ball , Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Diary of Sir George Fottrell (Cambridge, 2008), 3 .

31. In general, see K. Theodore Hoppen , ‘The Franchise and Electoral Politics in England and Ireland, 1832–1885’, History , 70 (1985), 202–17 .

32. For an extended treatment of this argument, see W.E. Gladstone , Special Aspects of the Irish Question (1886) .

33. Michael Bentley , Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001), 61 .

34. R.F. Foster , Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), 255 .

35. Quoted in Andrew Roberts , Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London 1999), 379 .

Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World , 63.

37. Roberts, Salisbury , 383–5; David Steele , Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London, 1999), 200 .

5 September 1893. Roberts, Salisbury , 589.

39. Trowbridge H. Ford , ‘Dicey’s conversion to unionism’, in Irish Historical Studies , 18:72 (September 1973), 552–82 .

Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government , 296.

41. For the similar starting points and different conclusions of pro- and anti-British Home Rulers, see G.K. Peatling , British Opinion and Irish Self-government, 1865–1925. From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001), 34–46 .

42. A.V. Dicey , England’s Case Against Home Rule (London, 1886), 17–18 .

Dicey, England’s Case , 33.

Roberts, Salisbury , 378, 382.

45. Allen Warren , ‘Lord Salisbury and Ireland, 1859–87: Principles, Ambition and Strategies’, Parliamentary History , 26, pt 2 (2007), 203–24 .

46. As Alvin Jackson observes, ‘Constructive Unionism was simply a more than usually expensive and progressive programme of colonial government; and it was partly the recognition of this which inspired resentment among loyalists.’ See his The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons 1884–1911 (Oxford, 1989), 115–16 .

Biagini, British Democracy , 221, 247.

48. E. H. Green , The Crisis of Conservatism: The politics, economics and ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995), 59–77, 194–206 .

49. Indeed, Indian nationalists studied the progress of Irish Home Rule as a means of gauging the likely success of their own reform agendas. See James McConnel and Matthew Kelly , ‘Devolution, federalism and imperial circuitry: Ireland, South Africa and India’ in Duncan Tanner , Chris Williams , Wil Griffith , and Andrew Edwards (eds), Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1945: Perspectives from the ‘Four Nations’ (Manchester, 2006), 171–91 .

50. David Miller , Queen’s Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin, 1978), 25ff .

51. Matthew Kelly , ‘The politics of Protestant street preaching in the 1890s Ireland’, Historical Journal , 48:1 (2005), 107–9 .

Quoted in Biagini, British Democracy , 257.

53. James Loughlin , ‘Creating “A Social and Geographical Fact”: Regional Identity and the Ulster Question 1880s–1920s’, Past & Present , 195 (May 2007), 159–96 .

54. Alvin Jackson , ‘Irish Unionism and the Russellite Threat, 1894–1906’, Irish Historical Studies , 25:100 (November 1987), 376–404 .

55. Alvin Jackson , Colonel Edward Saunderson: Land and Loyalty in Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1995) .

56. Matthew Kelly , ‘Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s’, Past and Present , 204 (August 2009), 127–54 .

Kelly, Fenian Ideal , 176.

58. Michael Wheatley , ‘John Redmond and Federalism in 1910’, Irish Historical Studies , 32:127 (May, 2001), 343–64 .

59. Michael Wheatley , ‘“These quiet days of peace”: Nationalist Opinion before the Home Rule Crisis, 1909–13’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Ireland in Transition, 1867–1921 (London, 2004), 62–7 .

60. Ruth Dudley Edwards , Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1977), 179 .

61. Jeremy Smith , ‘Bluff, bluster and brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill’, Historical Journal , 36:1 (March 1993), 161–78 .

62. Matthew Kelly , ‘The Irish Volunteers: A Machiavellian Moment?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The Ulster Crisis 1885–1921 (Basingstoke, 2006), 64–85 ; Kelly, Fenian Ideal , 179–236.

63. Daniel Jackson , Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain (Manchester, 2009) and David Thackeray , ‘Rethinking the Edwardian Crisis of Conservatism’, Historical Journal , 54:1 (2011), 202–6.

64. For the complexities of Redmondite recruiting efforts, see James McConnel , ‘Recruiting Sergeants for John Bull? Irish Nationalist MPs and Enlistment during the early months of the Great War’, War in History , 14:4 (2007), 408–28 .

65. Colin Reid , The Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950 (Manchester, 2011) .

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General Studies

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Home Rule Movement: Causes, Significance, Impact, Failures

Quest for upsc cse panels.

Sub-Categories:

GS-I: Modern History

Prelims :   Modern History

Mains : The Freedom Struggle — its various stages and important contributors/contributions from different parts of the country.

The Home Rule Movement in India marked a crucial milestone in the liberation struggle. It was India’s response to the First World War . From 1916 to 1918, the movement gained momentum throughout the country. Prominent leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, G.S. Khaparde, Sir S. Subramania Iyer, Joseph Baptista, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah c ame together. They recognised the need for a year-round national alliance. 

Their primary objective was to demand self-government or home rule for the entirety of India within the framework of the British Commonwealth. This alliance was to be known as the All India Home Rule League, drawing inspiration from the Irish Home Rule League.

Factors behind the Launch of the Home Rule Movement

The Home Rule Movement emerged as an assertive political movement. Several factors leading to the formation of the Home Rule Movement were:

• The Government of India Act 1909 failed to meet the aspirations of Indians.
• The split within the Congress Party in 1907 and the imprisonment of Bal Gangadhar Tilak from 1908 to 1914 resulted in a period of relative calm in the national movement.
• Some nationalists believed that popular pressure was necessary to achieve concessions from the government. The release of Tilak and the arrival of Annie Besant sparked a revival of the national movement.
• Indian leaders were divided on whether to support Britain in the war, but Annie Besant famously declared, "England's need is India's opportunity. "The burden of wartime hardships, such as high taxation and rising prices, made people more willing to participate in aggressive protest movements.
• Upon his return from exile in Mandalay, Tilak recognised the necessity of rejuvenating the nationalist movement in India and acknowledged the growing significance of the Congress Party in the country's political landscape.
• Tilak's primary objective was to rejoin the Congress Party, from which the extremist faction led by him had previously separated.
• In the December 1915 Congress session, largely influenced by Annie Besant's persuasion, it was decided to readmit the extremists into the party and involve them actively in the national struggle.
• However, both Besant and Tilak were unsuccessful in convincing Congress to support their proposal of establishing Home Rule Leagues.
• Besant managed to secure Congress's agreement to engage in educative propaganda and establish local-level committees . If these conditions were not fulfilled by September 1916, she would be free to establish a Home Rule League.

Two Home Rule Leagues

Tilak and Besant recognised that the support of a Congress dominated by Moderates and the cooperation of Extremists were crucial for the success of the Home Rule Movement:

• Failing to achieve a Moderate-Extremist agreement at the 1914 Congress sessio n, Tilak and Besant decided to revive political activity independently.
• In early 1915, Annie Besant initiated a campaign demanding self-government for India after the war, similar to white colonies. She used her newspapers, public meetings, and conferences to promote her cause.
• The efforts of Tilak and Besant found some success at the 1915 Congress session . The Extremists were admitted to Congress, although Besant's proposal for Home Rule Leagues was not approved. The Congress committed to an educative propaganda program and the revitalisation of local-level committees.
• Besant set a condition that if the Congress did not fulfil its commitments, she would establish her league. Due to Congress's lack of response, she eventually formed her league.
• Tilak and Besant formed separate leagues to prevent conflicts. They acknowledged that some of their supporters had reservations about each other. However, both leagues coordinated their efforts by focusing on their respective areas of work and collaborating whenever possible.

Tilak’s Home Rule League

• In April 1916, Tilak established the Indian Home Rule League.
• The first Home Rule League meeting organised by Tilak took place in Belgaum.
• The league's headquarters were in Poona (now Pune).
• The scope of Tilak's league was limited to specific regions, namely Maharashtra (excluding Bombay City), Karnataka, Central Provinces, and Berar.
• The league consisted of six branches.
• The demands of the league included Swarajya (self-rule), the creation of linguistic states, and education in the vernacular language.

Besant’s Home Rule League

• In September 1916, Annie Besant established the All-India Home Rule League.
• This Home Rule League was founded in Madras and had jurisdiction over the entire India, including Bombay City.
• It consisted of 200 branches spread across the country.
• Compared to Tilak's league, Besant's league had a looser organisational structure.
• George Arundale served as the organising secretary of the league.
• The main contributors to the league's work were B.W. Wadia and C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar.

About the Home Rule Movement

The Home Rule Movement in India marked a crucial milestone in the liberation struggle. It was India’s response to the First World War. From 1916 to 1918, the movement gained momentum throughout the country.

• Prominent leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, G.S. Khaparde, Sir S. Subramania Iyer, Joseph Baptista, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah came together. They recognised the need for a year-round national alliance.
• Their primary objective was to demand self-government or home rule for the entirety of India within the framework of the British Commonwealth.
• This alliance was to be known as the All India Home Rule League, drawing inspiration from the Irish Home Rule League.

Programme under the Home Rule Movement

• The Home Rule League campaign aimed to promote the concept of self-government to the common people.
• The campaign had a broader appeal compared to previous mobilisations and attracted politically backward regions like Gujarat and Sindh.
• Various methods were employed to achieve the goal, including political education, public meetings, libraries, conferences, propaganda through media, fundraising, social work, and participation in local government activities.
• The Russian Revolution of 1917 provided additional support to the Home Rule campaign.
• Prominent leaders such as Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru , Bhulabhai Desai, Chittaranjan Das, K.M. Munshi, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah joined the Home Rule agitation.
• Some Moderate Congressmen were disillusioned with the Congress' inactivity, and members of Gokhale's Servants of India Society also joined the Home Rule Movement.
• However, Anglo-Indians, most Muslims, and non-Brahmins from the South did not join as they perceived Home Rule as Hindu majority rule, particularly by the high caste.

Government's Response Towards Home Rule Movement

The government responded to the Home Rule Movement with severe repression.

• In Madras, students were prohibited from attending political meetings.
• A case was initiated against Tilak, but the high court later rescinded it.
• Tilak was barred from entering Punjab and Delhi.
• In June 1917, Annie Besant and her associates B.P. Wadia and George Arundale were arrested, leading to nationwide protests.
• Sir S. Subramania Aiyar renounced his knighthood in a dramatic gesture of protest.
• Tilak advocated a program of passive resistance in response to the repression.
• The government's actions only hardened the resolve of the agitators and strengthened their determination to resist.
• Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, commented on the government's situation, using a metaphor involving Shiva and Mrs. Besant.
• Annie Besant was eventually released in September 1917.

Significance of the Home Rule Movement

The Home Rule League operated throughout the year, unlike the Congress Party, which had annual activities.

• The movement gained significant support from educated Indians, with approximately 40,000 members in the combined leagues by 1917 .
• Many members of Congress and the Muslim League joined the Home Rule League, including prominent leaders such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Joseph Baptista, G.S. Khaparde, and Sir S. Subramanya Iyer.
• The movement briefly united moderates, extremists, and the Muslim League.
• The movement helped spread political awareness to more regions in the country.
• which recognised the inclusion of more Indians in the government and the development of self-governing institutions, ultimately leading to responsible governments in India.
• The declaration also marked a shift where the demand for home rule was no longer seen as seditious. This was the movement's greatest significance.

Reasons for Failure of the Home Rule Movement

The reasons for the decline were as follows:

• Lack of effective organisation within the Home Rule movement
• Communal riots occurred during 1917-18.
• The Moderates who joined the Congress after Annie Besant's arrest were appeased by discussions of reforms outlined in Montagu's August 1917 statement, which stated that self-government was the long-term goal of British rule in India, and by Besant's release.
• The Extremists' talk of passive resistance deterred the Moderates from participating in activities starting from September 1918.
• The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, known in July 1918, further divided the nationalist ranks. Annie Besant herself had conflicting views on the use of the league following the announcement of the reforms and regarding passive resistance techniques.
• Tilak had to leave for England in September 1918 due to a libel case against Valentine Chirol, whose book blamed Tilak for the political agitation in India. With Besant unable to provide clear leadership and Tilak being away, the Home Rule Movement was left without a leader.
• Gandhi's fresh approach to the freedom struggle began to capture the people's imagination , and the growing momentum of the mass movement pushed the Home Rule Movement to the sidelines until it eventually faded away.

The Home Rule Movement marked a pivotal chapter in the struggle for India's independence from British colonial rule. Led by prominent leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant, the movement aimed to achieve self-governance and empowerment for the Indian people. It played a crucial role in galvanising the Indian population, fostering national consciousness, and paving the way for India’s independence.

PYQs on Home Rule Movement

Question 1 : What is the correct sequence of the following events? (UPSC Prelims 1998)

• Tilak's Home Rule League
• Karnagatamaru Incident
• Mahatma Gandhi's arrival in India

Select the correct answer using the codes given below:

a) 1, 2, 3 

c) 2,1, 3 

Answer: (d) 

Question 2: Which one of the following began with the Dandi March? (UPSC Prelims 2009)

a) Home Rule Movement

b) Non-Cooperation Movement

c) Civil Disobedience Movement

d) Quit India Movement

Answer: (c)

Question 3 : Annie Besant was (UPSC Prelims 2013)

• responsible for starting the Home Rule Movement
• the founder of the Theosophical Society
• once the President of the Indian National Congress

Select the correct statement/statements using the codes given below.

a) 1 only 

b) 2 and 3 only

c) 1 and 3 only 

d) 1, 2 and 3

FAQs on Home Rule Movement

Q) who changed the name all india home rule league to swarajya sabha.

In 1920, Mahatma Gandhi assumed the role of the President of the All India Home Rule League and renamed the organisation Swarajya Sabha. However, within a year, the league merged with the Indian National Congress.

Q) What was the main objective of the Home Rule Movement? 

The primary goal of the Home Rule Movement was to achieve self-government in India within the framework of the British Empire. The movement aimed to increase people's participation in the country's governance.

Q) Why was the Home Rule Movement started?

The objective was to instil self-confidence among Indians, empowering them to protest against government repression. Another aim was to exert pressure on the British administration, urging them to grant Indians increased political representation. Additionally, the movement sought to revive political activism in India while upholding the ideals of the Congress Party.

Q) In which year Home Rule League Movement was started?

The Home Rule Movement commenced in 1916 and thrived in India between 1916 and 1918, spearheaded by prominent leaders Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Both these influential figures played crucial and active roles in the Home Rule Movement.

Q) What was the significance of the Home Rule Movement?

The Home Rule Movement marked a pivotal moment in India's freedom struggle, as it brought together the Muslim League and Congress, fostering unity among extremists and moderates. Notably, this movement played a key role in the issuance of the Montague Declaration of 1917.

© 2024 Vajiram & Ravi. All rights reserved

The Home Rule Idea

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• David Ress 2  

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The growing distrust of judges, legal scholars, and politicians in municipal electorates would provoke reaction. The idea of home rule for cities—that a city’s residents, as opposed to the state, had the right to define the structure and powers of municipal government—was a central plank in the platforms of the People’s Party in the 1890s. Yet progressives shortly afterward would link home rule with another notion: that cities needed apolitical, professional management of public services. A case study of one gadfly’s rebuffed effort toward accountability from a New Jersey political machine points to the frustration that many felt with the subordination of city government to state legislatures, and suggests why they turned from electoral efforts to propose structural reform, in particular the city manager system.

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People ex rel. The Board of Park Commissioners v. Mayor of Detroit, 28 Mich. 228 (Michigan Supreme Court, 1873) at 239; Detroit Citizens Street Railway v. Detroit Railway, 171 U.S. 48 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1898) at 51, Grand Rapids Electric Light and Power Co. v. Grand Rapids Edison Electric Light and Fuel Gas Co, 33 Fed Rep. 659 (U.S. District Court, western District of Michigan, 1888, Justice Jackson, at circuit).

“Promptness is Solons’ Promise,” The True Northerner (Paw Paw) Jan. 13, 1905, p. 6; Untitled editorial notes, Belding Banner, Feb. 2, 1905, p. 4; “The Democratic State Convention” Belding Banner , Aug. 9, 1906, p. 2; “William Lee Jenks, A Candidate for Delegate to Constitutional Convention,” The Yale Expositor , Aug. 9, 1907, p. 4; “Odell Chapman Files His Petition” Owosso Times , July 12, 1907, p. 5; John A. Fairlie “The Michigan Constitutional Convention,” Michigan Law Review , Vol. VI, No. 7 (May 1908) p. 5.

Report of the Committee on Submission and Address to the People (Lansing: State of Michigan, 1908) p. 42; Article 8, section 21, Michigan Constitution of 1908, accessed at http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/historical/miconstitution1908.htm . The powers of elected supervisors of counties and townships, which were not incorporated but instead purely creations of the state, were to be determined by the legislature. Article 8, section 17.

Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875 (Columbia, MO: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1920) Vol. 1, p. 206; Roscoe E. Harper, “Local and Special Legislation under the Constitution of 1875,” University of Missouri Law Bulletin Vol. 19 (June 1920), p. 19; Missouri Republican , April 5, 1876, cited in Thomas S. Barclay, The St. Louis Home Rule Charter of 1876 , (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1962) p. 4; Nathaniel B. Sylvester, History of Rennslaer County, New York (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1880) pp. 152–153; “On Self Ruled Cities?” New York Evening World , Aug. 14, 1894, p. 1.

The People of the State of California v. Mike Lynch and certain real estate 51 Cal. 15 (California Supreme Court, 1875); Article 6, California Constitution of 1879; Article 6, California Constitution of 1896; Kenneth Vanlandingham, “Municipal Home Rule in the United States,” William and Mary Law Review , Vol. 10, No. 2 (Winter, 1978) p. 285, citing People v. Henshaw 76 Cal. 435 (California Supreme Court, 1888) and Staube v. Election Commissioners 61 Cal. 313 (California Supreme Court, 1882). He takes a different view about the Missouri Supreme Court’s interpretation of that state’s constitutional provision for home rule, but Henry K. Schmandt, in “Municipal Home Rule in Missouri,” Washington University Law Quarterly , No. 4 (1953), p. 386, comments that the Missouri experience shows that the “basic aims of home rule have seldom been looked up by the courts with any degree of enthusiasm or even favor.” For Minnesota, see “An Unwarranted Attack,” St. Paul Globe , Oct. 24, 1896, p. 4; 1895 Laws of Minnesota, Chapter 4; “Corporate Oppressors” Minneapolis Journal Aug. 27, 1902, p. 1.

“Businessmen Lead,” Wichita Daily Eagle Nov. 17, 1897, p. 1. The Resubmission League was not successful, however. There is a particularly vivid description of Johnson’s campaigning and emphasis on home rule in “Tom L. Johnson’s Circus Campaign” St. Louis Sunday Republic , Sept. 29, 1902, p. 46.

“Allied Third Party Movement launched at Kansas City,” Butte (Montana) InterMountain , June 20, 1901, p. 1; “The Democratic Platform” The Hocking Sentinel , (Logan, Ohio) July 18, 1901, p. 1; “Bourne Writes to Sellwood Club Defending the Initiative,” East Oregonian (Pendleton, Ore.) July 8, 1909, p. 6.

Alden Freeman, A Year in Politics (East Orange, N.J.: self-published, 1906), p. 7.

Ibid., pp. 3, 19, 23, 26, 78; Lincoln Steffens to Freeman, Jan. 29, 1906, Ibid., p. Viii. “Alden Freeman,” American Biography, A New Cyclopedia, ed. William R. Cutter, (New York: American Historical Society, 1918), Vol. 4, p. 47.

Alden Freeman, “A Warning to the Voters of East Orange,” New York Tribune , Nov. 2, 1903, reprinted in Freeman, A Year in Politics , p. 29.

Ibid.; “The Secret Influence Revealed at Citizens Union Banquet After Two Years of Mystery,” Newark (N.J.) Evening News , March 5, 1905, p. 1.

American Biography: A New Cyclopedia , Vol. 4, p. 48; Freeman, a Year in Politics, p. 15; “Offered Colby Governorship,” New York Sun , Nov. 6, 1906, p. 4.

New Jersey Legislative Manual (Trenton, NJ: Thomas F. Fitzgerald, 1908), pp. 280–281.

“Clerk Riker Must Show Cause,” New York Sun , Oct. 13, 1907, p. 13; In re Freeman, at 332.

The political advertisements “Forty Years an Office Seeker” and “Tell the Truth … J.J. Williams for Mayor of Memphis,” The (Memphis, Tenn.) News-Scimitar , Oct. 15, 1919, p. 11 and Oct. 21, 1919, p. 8, show Wellford and Williams still attacking one another, sixteen years after their clash over the streets. The Citizens Union credo is found in Freeman, A Year in Politics , p. 56, and his comments on Long and appointed commissions at Ibid., p. 74.

“Municipal Government,” New York Tribune , Jan. 15, 1900, p. 5.

A Municipal Program, A Report of a Committee of the National Municipal League (New York: Macmillan & Co, 1900), pp. 159–160; for a discussion of the reform see Frank J. Goodnow, “The Place of the Council and Mayor in the Organization of Municipal Government—The Necessity of Distinguishing Legislation from Administration,” Ibid. pp. 74–87 and John A. Fairlie, “Municipal Development in the United States,” Ibid., p. 28; for the mayoral and bicameral model see Nathan Matthews, The City Government of Boston (Boston: City of Boston, 1895), p. 164.

Woodrow Wilson “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly , Vol. 2, No. 2 (June 1887) pp. 197–222; Horace M. Deming, “The Municipal Problem in the United States,” in A Municipal Program , p. 46; Fairlie, “Municipal Development,” pp. 27–28, 36; Goodnow, “The Place of the Council and Mayor,” p. 75; Delos F. Wilcox, “An Examination of the Proposed Municipal Program,” p. 225.

Records of the Common Council, 1904–1911 , Staunton, Va., pp. 125–128, 156, 229, 245, 348; Records of the Board of Aldermen, 1906–1911 , Staunton, Va., pp. 150–151; “The New City Fathers,” Staunton Spectator and Vindicator , June 22, 1906, p. 3; John Crosby, “Staunton’s General Manager, Virginia City Run as a Business Proposition,” Municipal Journal and Engineer , Dec. 29, 1909 pp. 954–956; Henry Oyen, “A City with a General Manager,” The World’s Work , Vol. 27 (1911), p. 227; Mary Swan Carroll, “History of the Staunton City Manager Government,” MS, Staunton Public Library, p. 31; Robert C. Hiden “Running a Town as a Business,” Harper’s Weekly , May 21, 1910, p. 14.

Robert Hiden “Running a Town as a Business,” Harper’s Weekly , May 21, 1910, pp. 13–14; Henry Oyen, “A City with a General Manager,” The World’s Work , Vol. 27 (1911), pp. 220–228; Ernest F Bradford, Commission Government in American Cities (New York: Macmillan, 1911) pp. 119–126; “Unique Official is Driven away by Jobless” Washington Herald April 21, 1911; “Unique Official is Driven away by Jobless” Washington Herald, April 21 1911; “A Municipal Business Manager,” Arizona Republic , May 21, 1911, p. 2; “General Manager in Staunton Gives Good City Government” Washington Times, May 14, 1909, p. 1; “A City with A General Manager” Honolulu Star-Bulletin , Dec. 14, 1912, p. 26; “Town Needs a Manager,” The French Broad Hustler (Hendersonville, N.C), Feb. 17, 1910, p. 1; “City with a General Manager,” Aberdeen (Washington) Herald , Jan. 24, 1910, p. 4; “City General Manager,” The Ocala (Fla.) Evening Star , Jan. 6, 1911, p. 2; “It is But A Step,” The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah), Dec. 29, 1911, p. 4; “Endorse Commission Plan” Fort Mill (S.C.) Times , Feb. 1, 1912, p. 1; “A City Manager by a Civil Engineer,” The Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu, T.H.) Feb. 9, 1912, p. 4; “Hancock Department” The Calumet (Mich.) News , May 10, 1912, p. 3; “A City Wants a General Manager,” The Watchman and Southron (Sumter S.C.), Nov. 6, 1912, p. 6; “A City with A General Manager” Honolulu Star-Bulletin , Dec. 14, 1912, p. 26; “The City Business Manager,” The Caldwell (Idaho) Tribune , Dec. 20, 1912, p. 4; “Talk of Town Development,” The Fairmount West Virginian , Feb. 19, 1913, p. 2; “The City Manager,” El Paso Herald , June 14, 1913, p. 6; L.M. Hewit, “What’s the Matter with the Water?” Bryan Daily Eagle and Pilot , July 24, 1913, p. 1; “The State’s Needs” Western Kansas World (WaKenny, Kans.) Jan. 20, 1917, p. 2; William A. Grubert, The Origins of the City Manager Plan in Staunton, Virginia (Staunton, Va.: City of Staunton, 1954) p. 5, 24 (Grubert was a long-serving mayor of Staunton); Leonard D. White, The City Manager (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927) p. 92.

Chester Rightor, City Manager in Dayton (New York: Macmillan, 1919) p. 2, citing a March, 1896 address by Patterson at the city’s centennial celebration.

“Home Rule Initiative a Vicious Measure” Leavenworth (Wash.) Echo , May 26, 1916, p. 1; “Home Rule for Cities Refused,” Ward County Independent (Minot, N.D.), Jan. 23, 1919, p. 9.

Detroit Citizens Street Railway v. Detroit Railway, 171 U.S. 48 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1898).

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Grand Rapids Electric Light and Power Co. v. Grand Rapids Edison Electric Light and Fuel Gas Co, 33 Fed Rep. 659 (U.S. District Court, western District of Michigan, 1888).

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The People of the State of California v. Mike Lynch and certain real estate, 51 Cal. 15 (California Supreme Court, 1875).

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Bradford, Ernest F. Commission Government in American Cities . New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Carroll, Mary Swan. History of the Staunton City Manager Government. MS, Staunton Public Library, p. 31.

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Deming, Horace M. The Municipal Problem in the United States. In A Municipal Program, A Report of a Committee of the National Municipal League, 6–58. New York: Macmillan, 1900.

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Ress, D. (2018). The Home Rule Idea. In: Municipal Accountability in the American Age of Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68258-7_5

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Home Rule Movement (1915–1916)

• August Declaration, 1917
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Home » Modern Indian History » National Movement (1885 – 1919) » Home Rule Movement (1915–1916)

Introduction:

The home rule movement was the Indian response to the First World War in a less charged but in a more effective way. With people already feeling the burden of war time miseries caused by high taxation and a rise in prices, Tilak and Annie Besant ready to assume the leadership the movement started with great vigour. Two Indian Home Rule Leagues were organised on the lines of the Irish Home Rule Leagues and they represented the emergence of a new trend of aggressive politics. The League campaign aimed to convey to the common man the message of home rule as self-government.

 Objectives of Home Rule Movement:

• To achieve self-government in India.
• To promote political education and discussion to set up agitation for self-government.
• To build confidence among Indians to speak against the government’s suppression.
• To demand a larger political representation for Indians from the British government.
• To revive political activity in India while maintaining the principles of the Congress Party.

Major contributions of Home Rule Movement to the freedom struggle of India: 

• The leagues organised demonstrations and agitations.
• There were public meetings in which the leaders gave fiery speeches.
• They were able to create a stir within the country and alarm the British to such an extent that Annie Besant was arrested in June 1917.
• This move by the British created a nation-wide protest and now even moderate leaders joined the league. Besant was released in September 1917.
• The Home Rule League functioned throughout the year as opposed to the Congress Party whose activities were confined to once a year.
• The movement was able to garner huge support from a lot of educated Indians. In 1917, the two leagues combined had around 40,000 members.
• Many members of the Congress and the Muslim League joined the league. Many prominent leaders like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Joseph Baptista, G S Kharpade and Sir S Subramanya Iyer were among its members.
• The moderates, extremists and the Muslim League were briefly united through this movement.
• The movement was able to spread political consciousness to more regions in the country.
• This movement led to the Montague Declaration of 1917 in which it was declared that there would be more Indians in the government leading to the development of self-governing institutions ultimately realising responsible governments in India.
• This Declaration, also known as August Declaration, implied that the demand for home rule would no longer be considered seditious. This was the biggest significance of the movement.

Reasons for movement to fade out:

• The movement was not a mass movement. It was restricted to educated people and college students.
• The leagues did not find a lot of support among Muslims, Anglo-Indians and non-Brahmins from Southern India as they thought home rule would mean a rule of the upper caste Hindu majority.
• Many of the moderates were satisfied with the government’s assurance of reforms (as preluded in the Montague Declaration). They did not take the movement further.
• Annie Besant kept oscillating between being satisfied with the government talk of reforms and pushing the home rule movement forward. She was not able to provide firm leadership to her followers. Although ultimately she did call the reforms ‘unworthy of Indian acceptance’.
• In September 1918, Tilak went to England to pursue a libel case against Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, British journalist and author of the book ‘Indian Unrest’. The book contained deprecatory comments and had called Tilak the ‘Father of Indian Unrest.’
• The Government made use of Defence of India Act, 1915 to curb the activities of the agitators.
• Students were prohibited from attending Home Rule meetings.
• Tilak was prosecuted and his entry in Punjab and Delhi was banned.
• Indian Press Act of 1910 was imposed on the press and restrictions were enforced.
• Tilak’s absence and Besant’s inability to lead the people led to the movement’s fizzing out.
• The movement was left leaderless with Tilak going abroad and Besant unable to give a positive lead.
• After the war, Mahatma Gandhi gained prominence as a leader of the masses and the Home Rule Leagues merged with the Congress Party in 1920.

The home rule movement lent a new dimension and a sense of urgency to the national movement. Although its role in the Indian independence movement had been modest, it did succeed in helping to sustain the movement’s impetus during the war years—as manifested in the signing of the Lucknow Pact in December 1916.

The Indian Home Rule movement was a movement in British India on the lines of Irish Home Rule movement and other home rule movements. The movement lasted around two years between 1916–1918 and is believed to have set the stage for the independence movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

Indian home rule movement began in India in the background of World War I. The Government of India Act (1909) failed to satisfy the demands of the national leaders. However, the split in the congress and the absence of leaders like Tilak, who was imprisoned in Mandalay meant that nationalistic response was tepid.

By 1915, many factors set the stage for a new phase of nationalist movement. The rise in stature of Annie Besant (who was of Irish origin and a firm supporter of Irish home rule movement), the return of Tilak from exile and the growing calls for solving the split in congress began to stir the political scene in India. The Ghadar Mutiny and its suppression led to an atmosphere of resentment against British rule.

Role of Various personalities in HRL:

Tilak on Home Rule  

• Lokmanya Tilak first started the Home Rule Movement. He was against the discriminative attitude of the British government. He was of the opinion that the Britishers were responsible for the degrading condition of the Indians.
• He said that they made the Indians economically weak. In order to uplift the Indians from their degrading condition and make them strong enough to fight the war of independence, he establishes the Home Rule League in India in 1916 along with Mrs. Annie Besant.
• His main aim was to drive out the Britishers from India ultimately and establish a self-government in India. His main political goal was the political emancipation of the motherland. The main aim of the movement was to give the Indians their rights.
• Tilak said that every community should have the right of self-determination Tilak’s approach towards emancipation and uplift of individuals was highly acclaimed by the individuals.

Gandhiji on Home Rule 

• First, Gandhi argues that ‘Home Rule is Self Rule’. He argues that it is not enough for the British to leave only for Indians to adopt a British-styled society. As he puts it, some “want English rule without the Englishman … that is to say, [they] would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englishtan. This is not the Swaraj I want.”
• Gandhi also argues that Indian independence is only possible through passive resistance. In fact, more than denouncing violence, Gandhi argues that it is counter-productive; instead, he believes, “The force of love and pity is infinitely greater than the force of arms. There is harm in the exercise of brute force, never in that of pity.” This is essential throughout Hind Swaraj.
• To exert passive resistance, Gandhi reasons that Swadeshi (self-reliance) be exercised by Indians, meaning the refusal of all trade and dealings with the British. He addresses the English when he states, “If you do not concede our demand, we shall be no longer your petitioners. You can govern us only so long as we remain the governed; we shall no longer have any dealings with you.” Gandhi makes an intriguing argument here: if the British want India for trade, remove trade from the equation.
• Finally, Gandhi argues that India will never be free unless it rejects Western civilization itself. In the text he is deeply critical of western civilization, claiming, “India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization.” He speaks about civilization not just in relation to India, though. He argues that “Western civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self destroyed.” It is a profound repudiation. Not only is western civilization unhealthy for India, but western civilization is by its own virtue unhealthy.

Tagore on Home Rule 

• Sir Rabindra Nath reviewed the political situation created by the Home Rule agitation and the attitude of the Government towards it. He impressed upon the audience that it would not do for the people of Bengal to cry for Self-Government if they continue to be bound and led as they had been for ages past by false ideals of society, religion and morality and sacrificed truth and right at the alter of those ideals.

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Isaac Butt’s strengths and weaknesses for Leaving Cert History #625Lab

Comment on isaac butt’s strengths and weaknesses as leader of the home rule party..

• The factual content of the essay is very good for the most part, and covers all important topics of the Home Rule movement
• If you’re going to abbreviate the names of parties and movements like the Home Government Association, make sure that when you spell it fully for the first time, put your intended abbreviation in brackets after it – Home Government Association (HGA)
• The paragraphs are quite long, and could maybe be split into twice as many shorter paragraphs
• Introduction needs to address the question: the question asks for you to comment on Butt’s strengths and weaknesses, so you need to outline these in the introductory paragraph
• This essay seems to focus more at times on the strengths and weaknesses of the HGA and then the Home Rule League – be careful that you always focus on Butt himself, and how his own characteristics were behind these strengths and weaknesses
• It is not enough to simply say at the end of each paragraph something along the lines of “these were some of Butt’s weaknesses” – you must support your arguments throughout the paragraph and if you find that what you’re writing doesn’t highlight either a strength or a weakness of Butt’s, then it’s not relevant information
• There is too much focus on Butt’s weaknesses and very little mention of his strengths – there is particular overuse of his personal struggles as a weakness – you need to address both parts of the question equally
• The conclusion is weak and incomplete – use the conclusion to wrap up your argument, not to add more information that doesn’t address the question

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: May 15, 2018
• Post category: #625Lab History / History

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Home > LAWREVS > WASHINGTONLAWREVIEW > WLR > Vol. 64 > No. 1 (1989)

Washington Law Review

Home rule: an essay on pluralism.

Michael Libonati

Home rule can be viewed as a metaphor for the policies of decentralization and diffusion of power. This Essay aims to rediscover some of the deep historical roots of the policy and practice of local self-government. The Essay also explores some of the ways in which local autonomy can be reimagined in contemporary contexts.

Recommended Citation

Michael Libonati, Home Rule: An Essay on Pluralism , 64 W ash. L. R ev. 51 (1989). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol64/iss1/6

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Essay on Breaking A Rule

Students are often asked to write an essay on Breaking A Rule in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Breaking A Rule

Understanding rules.

Rules are like the lines on a road. They guide us and keep us safe. They help us live in harmony with others. Schools, homes, and societies all have rules. They make sure things run smoothly.

Why People Break Rules

Sometimes, people break rules. They might be curious or rebellious. They might want to feel free or just test the limits. But remember, every action has a reaction. Breaking a rule can lead to problems.

Consequences of Breaking Rules

Breaking rules can lead to trouble. At school, you might get detention. At home, you might lose privileges. In society, you might face legal consequences. It’s important to think before you act.

Learning from Mistakes

Breaking a rule can be a learning experience. It can teach us about right and wrong. It can help us understand why rules are important. So, if you break a rule, try to learn from it.

Rules are there for a reason. They help keep order and safety. Breaking them can lead to problems. But it can also be a chance to learn. Always remember, rules are our friends, not enemies.

250 Words Essay on Breaking A Rule

Rules are like road signs. They guide us on the right path. They help us know what is expected of us and what we should avoid. When we follow rules, everything runs smoothly. Like a well-oiled machine, we can all work and play together without any problems.

Breaking A Rule

Sometimes, people choose to break a rule. This might be because they don’t agree with the rule, or because they think they won’t get caught. But breaking a rule is like throwing a stone into a calm pond. It creates ripples that can affect many people.

When a rule is broken, there are usually consequences. These might be small, like getting a time-out at school. Or they might be big, like getting into trouble with the law. Consequences are meant to teach us that breaking rules is not a good idea. They remind us that rules are there to keep us safe and help us live together in peace.

Learning From Mistakes

Breaking a rule can also be a chance to learn. If we break a rule and face the consequences, we might think twice before breaking that rule again. We learn that our actions have effects on others and on ourselves. This can help us grow and become better people.

In conclusion, rules are important. They guide us and keep us safe. Breaking a rule can lead to consequences, but it can also be a chance to learn and grow. So, it’s always good to think before we act, and to remember the importance of rules in our lives.

500 Words Essay on Breaking A Rule

Rules are like a guidebook that shows us the right path in life. They are set by people who have more experience and wisdom than us. These rules help us to behave in a way that is good for us and for the people around us. For example, traffic rules help us to stay safe on the roads. School rules help us to learn and grow in a peaceful and organized environment.

What Does Breaking a Rule Mean?

Breaking a rule means not following the instructions or guidelines that are set for us. It’s like choosing to walk on a path that is not safe or right. For example, if a person chooses to cross the road when the traffic light is red, they are breaking a rule.

Why Do People Break Rules?

There are many reasons why people choose to break rules. Sometimes, they might not agree with the rule or find it too hard to follow. Other times, they might be in a hurry or not thinking clearly. Some people break rules because they like the thrill of doing something they are not supposed to do.

The Consequences of Breaking Rules

Breaking rules can lead to many problems. If you break a traffic rule, you might get into an accident or get a fine. If you break a school rule, you might get punished or even expelled. When you break a rule, you also lose the trust of people around you. They might start thinking that you are not reliable or responsible.

Sometimes, breaking a rule can also teach us a lesson. It can make us realize the importance of the rule and why it was put in place. It can help us understand that rules are not just there to control us, but to protect us and make our lives better.

In conclusion, breaking a rule is not a good thing. It can lead to problems and make people lose trust in you. It’s better to follow the rules and live a safe and peaceful life. But if you do break a rule, it’s important to learn from your mistake and try not to do it again. Remember, rules are there for a reason. They are there to guide us, protect us, and help us live a good life.

This essay is a simple and clear explanation of the topic ‘Breaking a Rule’. It is written in a way that is easy for school students to understand. It does not use complex words or phrases and sticks to the word limit of 500 words.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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The High-Class Problem That Comes With Home Equity

You may feel richer as you pay your mortgage down and home values go up. Using that equity is another matter entirely.

By Ron Lieber

A lot of money is tied up in people’s homes. Those who need to tap it most, however, may have the hardest time doing so.

Paying a mortgage is a form of forced savings. If you want to stay in your home, you have no choice but to make each payment. That money — plus appreciation in the home’s value — now equals $31.8 trillion for all households, according to the Federal Reserve, more than three times what it was in 2012.

Saving for retirement, on the other hand, is not mandatory. As a result, some homeowners end up with a lot of home equity but low retirement savings.

Here’s the problem with that situation. A retirement account is relatively easy to tap, and you can do it quickly. Home equity? Not so much.

The most obvious way to get to this equity is to sell your residence. But for some older homeowners, that may be out of the question.

Your home may be just the way you like it, because you built it that way or spent decades fixing it up. If you’re attached to local doctors or a house of worship, it is difficult to cut ties and move away. Clearing out years of belongings is a total pain. And an appropriate and affordable new place — no steps, minimal maintenance — may simply not exist wherever you want to be.

And there’s the money. If you have a mortgage and will need to borrow to buy your next place, today’s interest rates may be double your current one. There may be capital gains taxes on the sale, too.

Then there is the matter of your heirs, if any. In a Fannie Mae survey of older Americans last year, 62 percent said their goal was to leave their home to somebody else. If you have pride in the equity you’ve built — especially if you come from a historically disadvantaged group — the home is a testament to perseverance and a kind of legacy.

So, next! Want to refinance your mortgage and take cash out, or get a home-equity loan or line of credit, and you don’t mind high interest rates? Good luck, because you’ll need a high enough income and credit score to qualify.

That brings us to reverse mortgages . With this product, eligible people 62 and older can extract equity in a variety of ways, say through a lump sum. Interest accrues in the background, and the balance of the reverse mortgage goes up instead of down, the way a normal mortgage would. You generally pay off the mortgage when the home is no longer your principal residence .

Most people reject reverse mortgages. Lenders have rarely underwritten more than 100,000 federally insured ones in any fiscal year, and that hasn’t happened since 2009.

Why is that? Many older people remember scandals involving the products, when borrowers felt misled and surviving spouses or heirs could not keep the homes. New federal protections helped clean things up.

Still, reverse mortgages or something like them seem inevitable in a nation where individuals are entirely responsible for their own retirement savings. One good test for their utility is this: Do any financial advisers who pledge to act only in the best interest of their clients help members of their own family borrow in this way?

Jeremy Eppley , a financial planner in Owings Mills, Md., is one who does. His aunt lives in a house she owns outright. Inflation, however, has eaten away at her limited retirement income, and a reverse mortgage allows her to live better now.

“I’d never heard of her going on vacation,” Mr. Eppley said. “She could live a little.”

His aunt has no children, and potential heirs have no particular expectations about an inheritance. If need be, Medicaid could pay for her long-term care. This is a crucial point, since many people don’t tap into home equity because they want plenty left over to pay for a caregiver or nursing home themselves.

There is, of course, entrepreneurial ingenuity at work. A fair bit of it is focused on getting people (of any age) to hand over some of the future gains in their home’s value to a start-up in exchange for cash now.

Companies like HomePace , Hometap , Point , Unison and Unlock are already at it. Their calculators may take your breath away when you see how big of a cut they could get in a decade.

The ever increasing financialization of the linchpins of our future — 401(k)s and the loans against them, the degrees that can get people ahead and the $1.6 trillion of student debt they require — is alarming. But workplace savings and the drive for higher education reflect good instincts: Save for later, better yourself.

With home equity, we may have tipped too far into seeing homes as totems of a financial life well and conservatively lived.

Homes are trophies, sure. But their equity is also a tool. Absent any radically improved government safety net, people without much savings are going to need more ways to extract it.

Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.” More about Ron Lieber

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Either by choice or because they are priced out of the market, many people plan to never stop renting. Building wealth without home equity  requires a different mind-set.

You may feel richer as you pay your mortgage down and home values go up. As a result, some homeowners end up with a lot of home equity but low retirement savings. Here’s the problem  with that situation.

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