"The existing settlement of land in Ireland, whether dating from the
confiscations of the Stuarts, or from those of Cromwell, rests on a
proscription three or four times as long as that on which the settlement
of land rests over a considerable part of France. It may, therefore, be
considered as placed upon discussion in the estimation of all sane men;
and, this being the case, it is safe to observe that no inherent want of
respect for property is shown by the Irish people if a proprietorship
which had its origin within historical memory in flagrant wrong is less
sacred in their eyes than it would be if it had its origin in immemorial
right."[41]
The character which he gives of Irish landlordism deserves to be quoted:
"The Cromwellian landowners soon lost their religious character, while
they retained all the hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of
Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people. 'I have eaten
with them,' said one, 'drunk with them, fought with them; but I never
prayed with them.' Their descendants became, probably, the very worst
upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. The habits of the
Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness
of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus. Their
drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires
of England far behind. If there was a grotesque side to their vices
which mingles laughter with our reprobation, this did not render their
influence less pestilent to the community of which the motive of destiny
had made them social chiefs. Fortunately, their recklessness was sure,
in the end, to work, to a certain extent, its own cure; and in the
background of their swinish and uproarious drinking-bouts, the
Encumbered Estates Act rises to our view."[42]
Mr. Goldwin Smith deals with agrarian crime thus:
"The atrocities perpetrated by the Whiteboys, especially in the earlier
period of agrarianism (for they afterwards grew somewhat less inhuman),
are such as to make the flesh creep. No language can be too strong in
speaking of the horrors of such a state of society. But it would be
unjust to confound these agrarian conspiracies with ordinary crime, or
to suppose that they imply a propensity to ordinary crime either on the
part of those who commit them, or on the part of the people who connive
at and favour their commission. In the districts where agrarian
conspiracy and outrage were most rife, the number of ordinary crimes was
very small. In Munster, in 1833, out of 973 crimes, 627 were Whiteboy,
or agrarian, and even of the remainder, many, being crimes of violence,
were probably committed from the same motive.
"In plain truth, the secret tribunals which administered the Whiteboy
code were to the people the organs of a wild law of social morality by
which, on the whole, the interest of the peasant was protected. They
were not regular tribunals; neither were the secret tribunals of Germany
in the Middle Ages, the existence of which, and the submission of the
people to their jurisdiction, implied the presence of much violence, but
not of much depravity, considering the wildness of the times. The
Whiteboys 'found in their favour already existing a general and settled
hatred of the law among the great body of the peasantry.'[43] We have
seen how much the law, and the ministers of the law, had done to deserve
the peasant's love. We have seen, too, in what successive guises
property had presented itself to his mind: first as open rapine; then as
robbery carried on through the roguish technicalities of an alien code;
finally as legalized and systematic oppression. Was it possible that he
should have formed so affectionate a reverence either for law or
property as would be proof against the pressure of starvation?"[44] "A
people cannot be expected to love and reverence oppression because it is
consigned to the statute-book, and called law."[45]
These extracts are taken from _Irish History and Irish Character_, which
was published in 1861. But in 1867 Mr. Goldwin Smith wrote a series of
letters to the _Daily News_, which were republished in 1868 under the
title of _The Irish Question_; and these letters form, perhaps, the most
statesmanlike and far-seeing pronouncement that has ever been made on
the Irish difficulty.
In the preface Mr. Goldwin Smith begins:
"The Irish legislation of the last forty years, notwithstanding the
adoption of some remedial measures, has failed through the indifference
of Parliament to the sentiments of Irishmen; and the harshness of
English public opinion has embittered the effects on Irish feeling of
the indifference of Parliament. Occasionally a serious effort has been
made by an English statesman to induce Parliament to approach Irish
questions in that spirit of sympathy, and with that anxious desire to be
just, without which a Parliament in London cannot legislate wisely for
Ireland. Such efforts have hitherto met with no response; is it too much
to hope that it will be otherwise in the year now opening?"[46]
The only comment I shall make on these words is: they were penned more
than half a century after Mr. Pitt's Union, which was to shower down
blessings on the Irish people.
Mr. Goldwin Smith's first letter was written on the 23rd of November,
1867, the day of the execution of the Fenians Allen, Larkin, and
O'Brien. He says--
"There can be no doubt, I apprehend, that the Irish difficulty has
entered on a new phase, and that Irish disaffection has, to repeat an
expression which I heard used in Ireland, come fairly into a line with
the other discontented nationalities of Europe. Active Fenianism
probably pervades only the lowest class; passive sympathy, which the
success of the movement would at once convert into active co-operation,
extends, it is to be feared, a good deal higher.
"England has ruin before her, unless she can hit on a remedy, and
overcome any obstacles of class interest or of national pride which
would prevent its application, the part of Russia in Poland, or of
Austria in Italy--a part cruel, hateful, demoralizing, contrary to all
our high principles and professions, and fraught with dangers to our own
freedom. Our position will be worse than that of Russia in this respect,
that, while her Poland is only a province, our Fenianism is an element
pervading every city of the United Kingdom in which Irish abound, and
allying itself with kindred misery, discontent, and disorder.
Wretchedness, the result of misgovernment, has caused the Irish people
to multiply with the recklessness of despair, and now here are their
avenging hosts in the midst of us, here is the poison of their
disaffection running through every member of our social frame. Not only
so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an
Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political
power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and
in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England,
the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day
be patriotic to have dissuaded.
" ... That Ireland is not at this moment, materially speaking, in a
particularly suffering state, but, on the contrary, the farmers are
rather prosperous, and wages, even when allowance is made for the rise
in the price of provisions, considerably higher than they were, only
adds to the significance of this widespread disaffection.
"The Fenian movement is not religious, nor radically economical (though
no doubt it has in it a socialistic element), but national, and the
remedy for it must be one which cures national discontent. This is the
great truth which the English people have to lay to heart."[47]
Mr. Goldwin Smith then dispels the notion that the Irish question is a
religious one.
"When Fenianism first appeared, the Orangemen, in accordance with their
fixed idea, ascribed it to the priests. They were undeceived, I was
told, by seeing a priest run away from the Fenians in fear of his
life."[48]
Neither was it a question of the land.
"The land question, no doubt, lies nearer to the heart of the matter,
and it is the great key to Irish history in the past; but I do not
believe that even this is fundamental."