"The whole machinery of the Court must be remodelled if it is to
possess the confidence of the public. As it is at present composed, it
is too much subject to political influence and to the clamour of one
set of litigants to be independent. There are few of your readers, I
believe, who will not admit that it is a very alarming thing to find
a Court so constituted having the control of millions. The only
officials ever connected with the Court in which there was any degree
of confidence were the Court valuers attached to the Appeal Court.
They were men of independence and impartiality, but they were
dispensed with in a vain attempt to satisfy Mr. Parnell. I see by Mr.
Balfour's statement in the House of Commons on the 25th ult. that the
Chief Commissioners are again engaged in framing new rules with regard
to appeals. One would think that at the end of eight years they would
have had their rules complete, and that an alteration every three
months during that period ought to have brought them to perfection.
How long is this farce to continue? These are serious complaints
against a public body intrusted with the administration of justice.
They do not deserve to be lightly passed over, and I am confident
that, even should it suit the convenience of the present Government to
follow the example of their predecessors and ignore them, the English
people, with their strong sense of justice, will eventually insist on
the unfair treatment and glaring injustice and abuses complained of
being set right, and that those who have from political motives and
influence been placed in honourable and responsible judicial positions
shall give place to impartial men, who will deal out even-handed
justice to the landlord as well as to the tenant.--I remain your
obedient servant,
"JESSE LLOYD, Lieutenant-Colonel and J.P.,
"Agent for Lord Rossmore.
"Rossmore Agency Office, Monaghan."
Here, then, is the reverse of the medal. Hitherto the outcry has been
all for the tenant, and I do not say for a moment that this outcry was
not just. It was. The Irish peasant has had his wrongs, deep and
shameful; but now justice has been done to him so amply that the
overflow has gone to the other side. It is time to look at things as
they are, and to let well alone. Justice to the one has broadened out
into persecution of the other, and an Irish landlord is for the moment
the favourite cock-shy for aggressive legislation. But, as I have said
before, prejudice dies hard, and sentimental pity is often only
prejudice in a satin cloak. The Irish peasant is still assumed to be a
helpless victim, the Irish landlord a ruffianly tyrant; and a state of
things as obsolete as the Ogham language itself still rouses active
passion as against a living wrong. I go back to that statement in the
_Pall Matt Gazette,_ to which I have before alluded, as an instance of
the way in which the very froth of prejudice and falsehood is whipped
up into active poison by the short and easy way of imagination and
assertion. It is a fair sample of all the rest; but these are the
things which find credit with those who do not know and do not
enquire.
Advocating the making of blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty
to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone's
famous remedy of jam, this sapient "B.O.N." says:--
"The blackberry harvest would be over in the sunny Rhine country
before it began in Ireland. Why should not some practical native, go
over from home and see how it is all done? I quite know that any plan
for bettering the physical condition of our people is open to the
objection that as soon as they seem a little 'comfortable' the
landlord would raise the rent in many a case; but perhaps in a still
larger number of cases he would now be afraid to do so. And I know,
too, that even a blackberry wine industry will not be quite safe till
we have Home Rule; but is not that coming fast?"
This mischievous little word is in the very teeth of the fact that
rents cannot be raised on any plea whatsoever--certainly not because
the tenant makes himself better off by an industry other than his
farming--and that the whole machinery of Government had been put in
motion to protect the land tiller from the land-owner. Yet the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ is not ashamed to lend itself to this lie on the chance
of catching a few fluttering minds and nailing them to the mast of
Home Rule on the false supposition that this means justice to the
oppressed tenant and wholesome restraint of the brutal proprietor.
Professor Mahaffy, in a long letter to the _New York Independent,_
speaks of the same kind of thing still going on in America--this
bolstering up a delusion by statements as far removed from the truth
as that of "B.O'N.'s," to which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gives sanction
and circulation. That part of the American press which is under the
influence or control of the Irish Home Rulers still goes on talking of
the oppression to which the Irish tenant is subjected, just as the
speeches of the Agitators (_vide_ the astounding lies, as well as the
appalling nonsense talked, when Lady Sandhurst and Mr. Stansfeld were
made citizens of Dublin, and it was asserted that the Government
turned tail and fled before these "delegates") teem with analogous
assertions wherein not so much as one grain of truth is to be found.
Let it be again repeated in answer to all these falsehoods:--No tenant
can be evicted except for non-payment of one year's rent; that rent
can be settled by the courts, and if he has signed an agreement for an
excessive payment, his agreement can be broken; and he must be
compensated for all the improvements he has made or will swear that he
has made. Also, he can borrow money from the Government at the lowest
possible interest, and become the owner of his farm for less yearly
payment than his former rent. He, the Irish tenant, is the most
protected, the most favoured of all leaseholders in Europe or America,
but the old cries are raised, the old watch-words are repeated, just
as if nothing had been done since the days when he was as badly off as
the Egyptian fellah, and was, in truth, between the devil and the deep
sea. Let me repeat the legal and actual condition of things as
summarized by Mr. Montagu Crackanthorpe, Q.C. These six propositions
ought to be learned by heart before anyone allows himself to talk of
Home Rule or the Irish question:--
1. That every yearly tenant of agricultural land valued at less than
£50 a year can have his rent judicially fixed, and that the existence
of arrears of rent creates no statutory obstacle whatever, nor any
difficulty in procedure, if he is desirous of availing himself of the
Acts.
2. That every such agricultural tenant, whether he has had a fair rent
fixed or not, may sell his tenancy to the highest bidder whenever he
desires to leave; and that, if he be evicted, he has the right either
to redeem within six months, or to sell his tenancy within the same
period to a purchaser, who can likewise redeem, and thus acquire all
the privileges of the tenant.
3. That in view of the fall in agricultural produce, the Land
Commission is empowered and directed to vary the rents fixed by the
Land Court during the years 1881 to 1885, in accordance with the
difference in prices of produce between those years and the years 1887
to 1889.
4. That no tenant in Ireland can be evicted by his landlord unless his
rent is twelve months in arrear, and that the yearly tenant who is so
evicted must be paid full compensation for all improvements not
already compensated for by enjoyment, such, for instance, as
unexhausted manure, permanent buildings, and reclamation of waste
land. He may, it is true, be evicted on title after judgment obtained
against him for his rent, and in that case his goods and interest
(including his improvements) may be put up to auction by the Sheriff.
This is a matter which seems to require amendment; but it is to be
observed that the same consequences would follow if the judgment
creditor were a shopkeeper who had given the tenant credit or the
local money-lender or gombeen man. A compulsory sale under these
circumstances is not peculiar to landlordism, and it is a method to
which landlords seldom resort.
5. That if a tenant falls into arrear for rent, and becomes liable to
eviction, whether on title or not, the Court can stay process, if
satisfied that his difficulty arises from no fault of his own, and
can give him time to pay by instalments.
6. That if a tenant wishes to buy his holding, and comes to terms with
his landlord, he can borrow money from the Government at 4 per cent.,
by the help of which he may change his rent into an annuity, the
amount of the annuity being less than the rent, and the burden of the
annuity altogether ceasing at the end of forty-nine years.
The result by the way of this peasant proprietorship will be twofold.
On the one side it will create a greater uniformity of comfort and a
larger class of peaceable, self-respecting, law-abiding citizens. On
the other it will lower the general standard by doing away with that
better class of resident gentry and capitalized landowners, who in
their way are guides, teachers and helps to the peasantry. The absence
of this better class of resident gentry is one of the misfortunes of
French agricultural life and the justification of M. Zola; their
presence is one of the blessings of England. How will it be in Ireland
when the exodus is more complete than it is even now, and when the
villages and rural districts are left solely to peasant proprietors
and a celibate clergy? The Romish Church has never been famous for
teaching those things which make for intellectual enlightenment and
social improvement. The difference between the Protestant north and
the rest of Roman Catholic Ireland, as between the Protestant and
Romish cantons in Switzerland; is a truism almost proverbial. And
without the little leaven of such influence as the better educated and
more enlightened gentry may possess, the Irish peasant will be even
more superstitious, more blinded by prejudice and ignorance than he
is now. As it is, the old landlords are sincerely deplored, and the
good they did is as sincerely regretted. Those grand old hunting days,
now things of the past, still linger in the memory of the men who
participated in the fun and had their full share of the crumbs--and
the times when a grand seigneur paid a hundred pounds a week in wages
alone seem something like glimpses into a railed and fenced off El
Dorado, which the Plan of Campaign has closed for ever. So that the
sunshine has its shadow, for all the good to be had from the light.
It ought to be that peasant proprietorship will make the holder more
industrious and a better farmer than he has been as tenant. Whether it
will or not remains to be seen. As things are--always excepting Ulster
and the North generally--farming could scarcely be more shameful in
its neglect than it is--domestic life could scarcely be more squalid,
more savage, more filthy. Even rich farmers live like pigs and with
their pigs, and the stone house is no better kept than the mud
cabin--the forty-acre field no better tilled than the miserable little
potato patch. Had the farming been better, there would never have been
the poverty, the discontent, the agitation by which Ireland had been
tortured and convulsed. Had the men been more industrious, the women
cleaner and more deft, the Plan of Campaign would have failed for want
of social nutriment, where now it has been so disastrously triumphant.
Physical well-being is a great incentive to quiet living--productive
industry checks political unrest. Those who have something to lose are
careful to keep it; and we may be sure that Captain Moonlight would
not risk his skin if he had a good coat to cover it.
Also there is another aspect in which this land question may be
viewed, and ought to be viewed--in reference to the manner in which
the Irish farmer treats the property by which he lives:--that is the
aspect of his duty to the community in his quality of producer for the
community. We must all come down to the land as the common property of
the human race. Parcelled out as it may be--by the mile or the square
yard--it is the common mother of all men. We can do without everything
else, from lace to marble--from statues to carriages--but food we must
have; and the holders of land all the world over are really and
rightfully trustees for the race. The Irish peasant has no more right
to neglect the possibilities of produce than had William Rufus, or his
modern representative in Scotland, to evict villages for the making of
a deer forest. The principle of trusteeship in the land holds good
with small holders and great alike; but imagine what would be the
effect of a law which required so much produce from a given area on an
average for so long a period! The principle is of course conceded in
the rent, rates and taxes; but a direct application to produce would
set the kingdom in a blaze.
But in Ireland fields of thistles and acres of ragwort, with tall
purple spikes of loose strife everywhere, seem to be held as valid
crops, fit for food and good at rent-paying. These are to be found at
every step from Dublin to Kerry, and the most unpractised eye can see
the waste and neglect and unnecessary squalor of both land and
people. As an English farmer said, with indignation: "The land is
brutally treated." So it is--idleness, unthrift, and bad farming
generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural
standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim
garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully
tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among
the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on
the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the
cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than
that work-table on an acre of waste. Will the tiller, now the owner
and no longer only the leaseholder, go back from his evil ways of
thriftlessness and neglect, and instead of being content to live just
above the line of starvation, will he educate himself up to those
artificial wants which only industry can supply? Will the women learn
to love cleanliness, to regard their men's rags and their children's
dirt as their own dishonour, and to understand that womanhood has its
share of duties in social and domestic life? Will the sense of beauty
grow with the sense of proprietorship, and the filth of the present
surroundings be replaced by a flower garden before the cottage--a
creeper against the wall--a few pots of more delicate blooms in the
window? Will the taste for variety in garden produce be enlarged, and
plots of peas, beans, carrots, artichokes, pot-herbs, and the like, be
added to the one monotonous potato-patch, with a few cabbages and
roots for the baste, and a strip of oats as the sole cereal attempted?
Who knows? At present there is not a flower to be seen in the whole of
the West, save those which a luxuriant Nature herself has sown and
planted; and the immediate surroundings of the substantial farm-house,
like those of the mud cabin, are filth unmentionable, savage squalor,
and bestial neglect.
These things are signs of a mental and moral condition that goes
deeper than the manifestation. They do not show only want of the sense
of beauty--want of the sense even of cleanliness; they show the
absence of all the civilizing influences--all the humanizing
tendencies of modern society. By this want Ireland is made miserable
and kept low in the scale of nations. Had the race been
self-respecting, sturdy, upright, stubbornly industrious, all this
savage neglect would have mended itself. Being what it is--excitable,
imaginative, spasmodic, given over to ideas rather than to facts, and
trusting to Hercules in the clouds rather than to its own brawny
shoulders--this squalor continues and is not dependent on poverty.
Time alone will show whether changed agrarian conditions will alter
it. So far as his power goes, the priest does nothing to touch it. The
Church uses up its influence for everything but the practical purposes
of work-a-day-life. It teaches obediences to its ordinances, but not
civic virtues. It encourages boys and girls to marry at an age when
they neither understand the responsibilities of life nor can support a
family; but in its regard for the Sacrament it forgets the
pauperization of the nation. It enforces chastity, but it winks at
murder; it demands money for masses for the souls of the dead, but it
leaves on one side the homes and bodies of the living; it breeds a
race of paupers to drag the country lower and lower into the depths of
poverty, and thinks it has done a meritorious work, and one that
calls for praise because of the paucity of numbers in the percentage
of illegitimate births. Thus in Ireland, where everything is set
askew, even morality has its drawbacks, and less individual virtue
would be a distinct national gain.
The Home Rule enthusiasts say all that is wanted to remedy these
ingrained defects is a Parliament; all that is wanted to make Irishmen
perfect and Ireland a paradise is a Parliament chosen by the people
and sitting in College Green. Human nature will then be changed, and
the lion and the lamb will lie down together. The Papist will love the
Protestant, and the moral of the story about those two Scotch
Presbyterian boys, whose presence at the Barrow House National School
so seriously disturbed both priest and people, is one that will read
quite the other way. All the bitter hatred poured out against England,
against Protestants, against the law and its administrators, will
cease so soon as Catholics come to the place of power and the
supremacy of England is at an end. The Church which burned Giordano
Bruno and is affronted because his memory has been honoured--which
placed the Quirinale under the ban of the lesser excommunication, and
withstood the national impulse towards freedom and unity as
represented by Garibaldi--the Church which has ever been on the side
of intolerance and tyranny will suddenly, in Ireland under Home Rule,
become beneficent, just, and liberal, and heretics will no longer herd
with the goats but will take their place among the sheep. If, as Mr.
Redmond says, it is the duty of Irishmen to make the Government of
England an impossibility, it will then be their pleasure to make her
alliance both close and easy. Ulster and Kerry will march shoulder to
shoulder, and Leaguers and Orangemen will form an unbroken phalanx of
orderly and law-abiding citizens. In a word the old Dragon will be
chained and the Millenium will come.
The prospect seems too good to be true. Were we to follow after it and
put the loyal Protestant minority into the power of the anti-imperial
Catholic majority in the hope of seeking peace and ensuing it, we
might perchance be like the dog who let fall that piece of meat from
between his teeth--losing the substance for shadow. We do better, all
things considered, with our present arrangements--trusting to the
imperfect operations of human law rather than shooting Niagara for the
chance of the clear stream at the bottom.
The whirligig of Time has changed the relative positions of the two
great parties in Ireland. Formerly it was the Catholics who desired
the abolition of Home Rule, and the Protestants who held by the
National Parliament. That Parliament was exclusively Protestant, and
the powerful minority ground the helpless majority to the very ground.
Catholics were persecuted from shore to shore, and all sorts and
conditions of Protestant bullies and tyrants sent up petitions to
forbid the iniquity of Catholic trade rivalry. What was then would be
now--changing the venue and putting the Catholics where the
Protestants used to be. We do not believe that the "principle of
Nationality" is the working power of this desire for Home Rule, as Mr.
Stansfeld asserts--unless indeed the principle of Nationality can be
stretched so as to cover the self-aggrandizement of a party, the
bitterness of religious hatred, and the tyranny of a cruel and
coercive combination. The grand and noble name of Nationality can
scarcely be made so elastic as this. Respect for law lies at the very
heart of the principle, and the Irish Home Rulers are of all men the
most conspicuous for their contempt of law and their bold infraction
of the very elementary ordinances of civilized society.
As for tyranny, no coercion established by Government--not even that
proclaimed by Mr. Gladstone--has been more stringent than the coercion
exercised by the Plan of Campaign. What happened in Tipperary only
the other day when certain rent-paying tenants, who had been
boycotted, did public penance in the following propositions? They
offered:--"Firstly, to come forward to the subsequent public meeting
and express public contrition for having violated their resolution to
hold out with the other tenants; secondly, not to pay the next
half-year's rent, due on the 10th of December, but to in future act
with the general body of the tenantry; and thirdly, to pay each a
pecuniary sum, to be halved between the Ponsonby tenants and the
Smith-Barry Tipperary tenantry in the fight which is to come on."
Surely no humiliation was ever greater than this!--no decree of secret
council or pitiless Vehmgericht were ever more ruthlessly imposed,
more servilely obeyed! Can we say that the Irish are fit to be called
freemen, or able to exercise the real functions of Nationality, when
they can suffer themselves to be hounded like sheep and rated like
dogs for the exercise of their own judgment and the performance of
their duties as honest men and good citizens?
If the mere presence in Ireland of Lady Sandhurst and Mr. Stansfeld
dismayed Mr. Balfour and scattered his myrmidons as the forces of the
Evil One fly before the advent of the angels, could they not have used
their semi-divine power for these humiliated rent-payers? Instead of
complacently listening to bunkum--which, if they had had any sense of
humour would have made them laugh; any of modesty would have made them
blush--could they not have brought their inherited principles of
commercial honesty and manly fidelity to an engagement to bear on
these irate Campaigners, and have reminded them that the very core of
Liberalism is the right of each man to unrestricted action, provided
he does not hurt his neighbour? But Home Rulers are essentially
one-sided in their estimate of tyranny, and things change their names
according to the side on which they are ranged. To boycott a man, to
mutilate his cattle,[F] to commit outrages on his family, and finally
to murder him outright for paying his rent or taking an evicted farm,
are all justifiable proceedings of righteous severity. But for a
landlord to evict a tenant from the farm for which he will not pay the
covenanted rent--will not, but yet could, twice over--is a cowardly, a
brutal, a damnable act, for which those slugs from behind a stone-wall
are the well-deserved reward.
Here is an instance of the vengeance sought to be taken by wealthy
tenants evicted for non-payment of rent.
"Lord Clanricarde writes to the _Times_ to corroborate the statement
that an infernal explosive machine had been found in a cottage at
Woodford, in Ireland. His lordship quotes as follows from the account
of an eye-witness:--
'When possession was taken of the sub-tenant's house, No. 1, there was
the usual crowd crowding as close to our party as the police would
allow; but it was remarked that on our approach to houses Nos. 2 and
3, close together, and which concealed the infernal machine, the crowd
kept well away out of hearing, while the Woodford leaders were on a
car on the road, but out of danger like the others; but all well in
sight of any destruction that might befall the officers of the law.
This house, No. 3, when last examined in June, was found vacant, door
not locked, but open, and used as a shelter for cattle. Finding it
locked now, X. detached the lock, pushed the door open, and he and I
and others went inside. The house was empty, but a pile of stones was
heaped up in the doorway, some of them had been displaced by the door
when opened, and the top of a box 6 in. square was seen embedded in a
barrel containing 25 lbs. of 'excellent gunpowder,' a bottle full of
sulphuric acid, and other explosives, as well as a number of
detonators, and the blade of a knife (apparently) with a spring
attached by a coil of string to the door, the machine being so
arranged as to be liable to explode in two ways. The expert who
examined the machine said that had the sulphuric acid been liberated,
as meant, all our party, twenty in all, must have been destroyed, as
there were enough explosives to destroy any living thing within 100
yards. Neither on that day, nor on the 22nd (date of sale) did either
the tenant or the Woodford leaders--R. and K.--utter one word of
surprise, much less of abhorrence!'
The tenant proceeded against (says Lord Clanricarde, owed four and
a-half years' rent, at £47 8s. per annum) much below the taxation
valuation of £67 19s., for a mill, with the sole use of the
water-power, a valuable privilege, and 440 statute acres, a
considerable part of them arable land. He had ten sub-tenants, was
reported to make £500 per annum from mill and farm, and though he had
removed part of his stock, there were still cattle on the land on the
day of eviction enough to cover two years' arrears. If he had paid
even those two years on account he would have received an abatement,
and saved his farm. The judge in Dublin who gave the decree against
him, gave also costs against him to mark his sense of the tenant's bad
conduct."
And to think that good, honest, noble-hearted, and sincere Englishmen,
who in their own persons are law-abiding, just, honourable, and
faithful, should uphold a state of things which strikes at the root of
all law, all commercial honesty--blinded as they are by the glamour of
a generous, unreal, and unworkable sentiment! If only they would go
over to Ireland to judge for themselves on the basis of facts, not
fancies--and to be informed by truths not lies!
I know that we cannot all see alike, and that every shield has its two
sides. In this matter, on the one side stand Earl Spencer, now
converted to Home Rule, since his Viceroyalty; on the other is the
example of Mr. Forster, who went to Ireland an ardent Home Ruler and
came back as strong a Unionist. The Quaker became a fighting man, and
the idealist a practical man, believing in facts as he had seen them
and no longer in sentiments he could not realise--in measures grounded
on the necessities of good government, and not like so many epiphytes
with their roots in the air. Let Lord Spencer bring to this test his
late utterances. He goes in now for Home Rule, and the right of
Ireland to appoint her own police and judges. He is out of the wood
and can hallo; but where would he have been if the Irish had appointed
their police when he was at the Castle?--with Lord Frederick and Mr.
Burke! And if the judges were appointed by the Irish, we should have,
in all probability, Mr. Tim Harrington, barrister-at-law, on the
bench; and a few years ago Mr. Tim Harrington crumpled up the Queen's
writ and flung it out of the Court House window. And what power over
the fortunes of others can be given to men who boycott a railway for
political spite?[G]
So many things have conspired to make this Irish question a
Gordian-knot which no man can untie, and but few would dare to cut.
The past extravagance of the landlords, absenteeism, rack-renting,
injustice of all kinds; the past jealousy of England and her
over-shadowing all native industries and productions; difference of
religion, racial temperament, and the irreconcilable enmity of the
conquered towards the conquerors; ignorance and idleness; the morality
which marries too early, when the land, which was just enough to
support one family, is expected to keep three or four; want of
self-respect in the dirt and disorder of domestic life; want of all
communal life or amusement, save in heated politics and drink; bogs
here, unthrift there, small holdings everywhere--all these things help
to complicate a question which passion has already made too difficult
for even the most radical kind of statesmanship to adjust. All the
panaceas hitherto tried have been found ineffectual. The repeal of
Catholic disabilities, the establishment of national schools, the
disestablishment of the Protestant Church, the Maynooth grant, the
various Land Acts--all have done but little towards the settlement of
the question, which, like certain fabulous creatures, has increased in
strength and the extensions of its demands by every concession made.
The best chance yet offered seems to be in the quiet working of Lord
Ashbourne's Act, by which the tenant becomes the owner and the
landlord is not despoiled. And certainly the crying need of the moment
is legislative finality and political rest. Existing machinery is
sufficient for all the agrarian ameliorations demanded. To do much
more would be to act like children who pluck up their seeds to see how
they are growing, leaving nothing sufficient time for development or
reproduction.
No one would deny such a measure of Home Rule to Ireland as should
give her the management of her own internal affairs, in the same
manner and degree as our County Councils are to manage ours. But this
is not the Home Rule demanded by the leaders of the party. That for
which they have taken off their coats means the loss of the country as
an integral part of the Empire; the oppression and practical
annihilation of the Protestant section; the opening of the Irish
ports to all the enemies of England; or the breaking out of civil war
in Ireland and its reconquest by England. The alternative scheme of
federation is for the moment unworkable. But to hand over the whole
conduct of Irish affairs to the Roman Catholic majority would be one
of those ineffaceable political crimes the greatness of which would be
equalled only by the magnitude of its mistake. The language of the
indigenous Home Rulers and their Transatlantic sympathisers--as well
as the things they have done and are still doing--ought to be warnings
sufficiently strong to prevent such an act of folly and wickedness on
our part. Even our men--men of light and leading like Mr. John
Morley--seem to lose their heads when they approach the Irish question
and to become as rabid in their accusations as the paid political
agitators themselves. I will give these two short extracts, the one
from Mr. Morley's speech at Glasgow, and the other from Lord
Powerscourt's temperate and rational commentary:--
"Mr. Morley says," quotes Lord Powerscourt, "that the Irish people are
more backward than the Scotch or English, which I venture to doubt, at
least as regards intelligence, and gives as the reason:--
"'It is because the landlords, who have been their masters, have
rack-rented them, have sunk them in poverty, have plundered their own
improvements, have confiscated the fruits of their own industry, have
done all that they could to degrade their manhood. That is why they
are backward. (Cheers.) Will anybody deny that the Irish landlords are
open to this great accusation and indictment? If anybody here is
inclined to deny it, let him look at the reductions in rent that have
been made since 1881 in the Land Court.'
"Well, have not rents in England and Scotland been reduced quite as
much, nay, more, than Irish rents since 1881? And have not the
economic causes which have lowered the prices of all farm produce all
over Europe caused the same depreciation in the value of land in
Germany or France, for instance, in the same ratio as in Ireland? And
has not the importation of dead meat from America, Australia, or New
Zealand had something to do with it?
"These facts are well known. But to return to the Irish landlords.
Does not every one who is resident in Ireland, and therefore
conversant with the state of affairs there for the last twenty or
thirty years, know that the discontent and uprising against the land
system is due to the action of a very few unjust persons, now mostly
dead, but whose names are well known to any one who really knows
Ireland, as I venture to maintain Mr. Morley does not? The principal
actors in the drama could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And
Mr. Morley, _ex uno disce omnes_, accuses the whole of the Irish
proprietors of these cruel and unjust practices which we should scorn
to be guilty of. And he is an ex-Cabinet Minister, and late Chief
Secretary for Ireland for a few months, and a very popular one he was!
"He says, again: 'Public opinion would have checked the Irish
landlords in their infatuated policy towards their tenants,' &c. He
challenges denial of these charges. Well, I deny them most
emphatically, and am quite willing to abide by the verdict of the
respectable tenants. I throw back in his face the accusation that the
Irish landlords as a body have rack-rented or plundered their tenants
or confiscated their improvements.
"Far be it from me to taunt the Irish population. No, they have been
tempted very sorely by prospects being held out to them of getting the
land for nothing, and, all things considered, it is wonderful how they
have behaved. But Mr. Morley is like many another politician who comes
to Ireland for a few months or a few weeks, and goes about the few
disturbed districts and listens to all the tales told him by
cardrivers and those very clever people who delight in gulling the
Saxon, and goes back to England, full of all sorts of horrors and
crimes alleged to have been perpetrated by landlords, and takes it all
as gospel, making no allowance for the great intelligence and
inventive genius of his informers, and says, 'Oh! I went to the place,
and saw it all.' And this he takes to represent the normal state of
the whole of Ireland, and makes it a justification of the Plan of
Campaign!"
Take too the Irish Home Rule press, and read the floods of abuse--some
spreading out into absolute obscenity--published by the principal
papers day after day against all their political opponents, and we can
judge of the temper with which the Irish Home Rulers would administer
affairs. Of their statesmanlike provision--of their patriotism and
care for the well-being of the country at large--the local war now
ruining Tipperary is the negative proof--the damnatory evidence that
they are utterly unfit for practical power. Governed by hysterical
passion, by mad hatred and the desire for revenge, not one of the
modern leaders, save Mr. Parnell, shows the faintest trace of politic
self-control or the just estimate of proportions. To spite their
opponents they will ruin themselves and their friends, as they have
done scores of times, and are doing now in Tipperary. History holds up
its hands in horror at the French Terror--was that worse than the
system of murder and boycotting and outrage and terrorism in the
disturbed districts in Ireland? And would it be a right thing for
England to give the supreme power to these masked Couthons and
Robespierres and Marats, that they might extend their operations into
the now peaceable north, and reproduce in Ulster the tragedies of the
south and west? Mr. Parnell puts aside the tyrannous part of the
business, and cleverly throws the whole weight of his argument at
Nottingham into the passionless economic scales. All that the
Nationalist party desires, he says, "is to be allowed to develope the
resources of their own country at their own expense," "without any
harm to you (English), without any diminution of your resources,
without any risk to your credit, or call upon you," all to be done "at
our own expense and out of our own resources." Yet Mr. Parnell in
another breath describes Ireland as "a Lazarus by the wayside"--a
country "where unfortunately there is no manufacturing industry." "Ex
nihilo nihil fit," was a lesson we all learned in our school days. Mr.
Parnell has evidently forgotten his.
I will give a commentary on these brave words which is better put than
I could put it.