THE LAND QUESTION AND ITS SETTLEMENT
The General Election of 1900 witnessed a wonderful revival of national
interest in Ireland. Doubtless if the constituencies had been left to
their own devices they would have returned members responsive to the
magnificent resolves of the people. But the Parliamentarians were
astute manipulators of the political machine: they had for the most
part wormed themselves into the good graces of the local leaders, and
arranged for their own re-election when the time came. But there was
nevertheless a considerable leavening of new members--young,
enthusiastic and uncontaminated by the feuds and paltry personalities
of an older generation. They brought, as it were, a whiff of the free,
democratic air of the country to Parliament with them, and gave an
example of fine unselfishness and devotion to duty which did not fail
to have their influence on their elder and more cynical brethren. The
feud between the Dillonites and Healyites had not, however, been ended
with the general treaty of peace. Mr Redmond did not want Mr Healy
fought, but in the interests of internal peace Mr Dillon, Mr Davitt
and Mr O'Brien appear to have come to the conclusion that they could
not have Mr Healy in the new Party. Accordingly, Mr Healy and his
friends were fought wherever they allowed themselves to be nominated,
and Mr Healy himself was the only one to survive after a desperate
contest full of exciting incidents in North Louth.
I made my first bid for Parliamentary honours in the 1900 election,
when I had my name put forward as Labour candidate at the South Cork
convention. I was not very strongly supported then, but the following
May, on the death of Dr Tanner, I was nominated again as Labour
candidate for Mid-Cork, and after a memorable tussle at the Divisional
Convention I headed the poll by a substantial majority. Hence I write
from now onward with what I may claim to be an intimate inside
knowledge of affairs.
The first few years after the 1900 election saw us a solidly united
opposition in Parliament for the first time for ten years. Question
time was a positive joy to us younger members, who developed almost
diabolical capacity for heckling Ministers on every conceivable topic
under the sun. Our hostility to the Boer War also brought us into
perennial conflict with the Government. The Irish members in a very
literal sense once more occupied "the floor of the House," and there
were some fierce passages-at-arms, resulting on one occasion in the
forcible ejection of a large body of Nationalists by the police--an
incident which had no relish for those who were jealous of the
prestige and fair fame of the Mother of Parliaments. In Ireland the
fight for constitutional reform went on with unabated energy. All the
old engines of oppression and repression were at work, and the people
proved that they had lost none of their wit or resource in the
struggle with the forces of the Crown. Mr George Wyndham, whom I like
to look back upon as one of the most courtly and graceful figures in
the public life of the past generation, was installed in Dublin Castle
as Chief Secretary. I can imagine that nothing could have been more
distasteful to his generous spirit than to be obliged to use the
hackneyed weapons of brute force in the pursuance of British policy.
As an answer to the agitation for compulsory land purchase and a
settlement of the western problem Mr Wyndham introduced in 1902 a Land
Purchase Bill which fell deplorably short of the necessities of the
situation. It would have deprived the tenants of all free will in the
matter of the price they would be obliged to sell at, and left them
wholly at the mercy of two landlord nominees on the Estates
Commissioners, whilst it did not even pretend to find any remedy for
the two most crying national scandals of the western "congests" and
the homeless evicted tenants. No doubt there were many good and
well-meaning men in the Party, and out of it, who thought this Bill
should have been accepted as "an instalment of justice." But there are
times when to be moderate is to be criminally weak, and this was one
of them. It is as certain as anything in life or politics can be that
if the Bill of 1902 had been accepted, the Irish tenants would be
still going gaily on under the old rent-paying conditions. The United
Irish League was still in the first blush of its pristine vigour, and
when the delegates of the National Directory came up from the country
to Dublin they soon showed the mettle they were made of. They wanted
no paltry compromises, and it was then and there decided to enter upon
a virile campaign against rack-renters, grazing monopolists and
land-grabbers such as would convince the Government in a single winter
how grossly they had under-estimated the requirements of the country.
Some of the older men of the Party were pessimistic about the new
campaign. Messrs Dillon, Davitt and T.P. O'Connor wrote a letter to Mr
O'Brien remonstrating with him, in a tone of gentle courtesy, on the
extreme character of his speeches and actions. But Mr O'Brien was not
to be deflected from his purpose by any friendly pipings of this kind.
The country was with him. The country was roused to a pitch of
passionate resistance to the Wyndham Bill, and the Government, seeing
which way the wind blew, and realising that the time for half-measures
was past, withdrew their precious Purchase Bill. Then followed a
fierce conflict along the old lines. The Government sought to suppress
the popular agitation by the usual antiquated methods. Proclamation
followed proclamation, until two-thirds of the Irish counties, and the
cities of Dublin, Cork and Limerick, were proclaimed under the
Coercion Act and the ordinary tribunals of justice abolished. Public
meetings were suppressed. The leaders of the people were thrown into
prison: at one time no less than ten members of Parliament were in
jail. The country was seething with turmoil and discontent and there
was no knowing where the matter would end. The landlords, feeling the
necessity for counter-action of some kind, organised a Land Trust of
£100,000 to prosecute Messrs Redmond, Davitt, Dillon and O'Brien for
conspiracy. The United Irish League replied by starting a Defence Fund
and arranging that Messrs Redmond, Davitt and Dillon should go to the
United States to make an appeal in its support. All the elements of
social convulsion were gathering their strength, when an unknown
country gentleman wrote a letter to the Irish newspapers dated 2nd
September 1902, in the following terms:--
"For the last two hundred years the land war in this country has raged
fiercely and continuously, bearing in its train stagnation of trade,
paralysis of commercial business and enterprise and producing hatred
and bitterness between the various sections and classes of the
community. To-day the United Irish League is confronted by the Irish
Land Trust, and we see both combinations eager and ready to renew the
unending conflict. I do not believe there is an Irishman, whatever his
political feeling, creed or position, who does not yearn to see a true
settlement of the present chaotic, disastrous and ruinous struggle. In
the best interests, therefore, of Ireland and my countrymen I beg most
earnestly to invite the Duke of Abercorn, Mr John Redmond, M.P., Lord
Barrymore, Colonel Saunderson, M.P., the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the
O'Conor Don, Mr William O'Brien, M.P., and Mr T.W. Russell, M.P., to a
Conference to be held in Dublin within one month from this date. An
honest, simple and practical suggestion will be submitted and I am
confident that a settlement will be arrived at."
The country rubbed its eyes to see who it was that had put forward
this audacious but not entirely original proposal. (It had been
suggested by Archbishop Walsh fifteen years before.) Captain John
Shawe-Taylor's name suggested nothing to the Nationalist leaders. They
had never heard of him before. In the landlord camp he stood for
nothing and had no authority--he was simply the young son of a Galway
squire, with entire unselfishness and boundless patience, who
conceived that he had a mission to settle this tremendous problem that
had been rendered only the more keen by forty-two Acts of the Imperial
Parliament that had been vainly passed for its settlement. It is
surely one of the strangest chances of history that where generations
of statesmen and parliaments had failed the _via media_ for a
final arrangement should have been made by an unknown officer who
prosecuted his purpose to such effect that he forced his way into the
counsels of the American Clan-na-Gael, and even, as we are told,
"beyond the ante-chambers of royalty itself." It is probable that
Captain Shawe-Taylor's invitation would have been regarded as the
usual Press squib had it not been followed two days later by a public
communication from Mr Wyndham in the following terms:--
"No Government can settle the Irish Land Question. It must be settled
by the parties interested. The extent of useful action on the part of
any Government is limited to providing facilities, in so far as that
may be possible, for giving effect to any settlement arrived at by the
parties. It is not for the Government to express an opinion on the
opportuneness of the moment chosen for holding a conference or on the
selection of the persons invited to attend. Those who come together
will do so on their own initiative and responsibility. Any conference
is a step in the right direction if it brings the prospect of a
settlement between the parties near, and as far as it enlarges the
probable scope of operations under such a settlement."
This official declaration gave an importance and a significance to
Captain Shawe-Taylor's letter which otherwise would never have
attached to it. The confession that "no Government can settle the
Irish Land Question" was in itself a most momentous admission. It was
the most ample justification of nationalism, which held that a foreign
Parliament was incompetent to legislate for Irish affairs, and now the
accredited mouthpiece of the Government in Ireland had formally
subscribed to this doctrine. This admission was in itself and in its
outflowing an event comparable only to Gladstone's conversion to Home
Rule. It amounted to a challenge to Irishmen to prove their competence
to settle the most sorely-beset difficulty that afflicted their
country. Not only were Irishmen invited to settle this particularly
Irish question, but they were given what was practically an official
assurance that the Unionist Party would sponsor their agreement,
within the limits of reason.
Immediately Captain Shawe-Taylor's proposal became canvassed of the
newspapers and the politicians. Mr Dillon seemed to be sceptical of
it, as a transparent landlord dodge. It was, however, enthusiastically
welcomed by the _Freeman_, whilst _The Daily Express_, the
organ of the more unbending of the territorialists, denounced it
mercilessly, and no sooner did the Duke of Abercorn, Lord Barrymore,
the O'Conor Don and Colonel Saunderson learn that Mr Redmond, the Lord
Mayor of Dublin, Mr T.W. Russell and Mr O'Brien were willing to join
the Conference than they wrote to Captain Shawe-Taylor declining his
invitation. The Landowners Convention, the official landlord
organisation, also by an overwhelming majority decided against any
peace parley with the tenants' representatives. But the forces in
favour of a conference were daily gaining force even amongst the
landlord class; whilst on the tenants' side a meeting of the Irish
Catholic Hierarchy, attended by three archbishops and twenty-four
bishops, with Cardinal Logue in the chair, cordially approved the Land
Conference project and put on record their earnest hope "that all
those on whose co-operation the success of this most important
movement depends may approach the consideration of it in the spirit of
conciliation in which it has been initiated." The Irish Party, on the
motion of Mr Dillon, also unanimously adopted a resolution approving
of the action taken by Messrs Redmond, O'Brien and Harrington in
expressing their willingness to meet the landlord representatives. The
mass of the landlords were so far from submitting to the veto of the
Landowners' Convention that, headed by men of such commanding position
and ability as the Earl of Dunraven, Lord Castletown, the Earl of
Meath, Lord Powerscourt, the Earl of Mayo, Colonel Hutcheson-Poë and
Mr Lindsay Talbot Crosbie, they formed a Conciliation Committee of
their own to test the opinion of the landlords over the heads of the
Landowners Convention. The plebiscite taken by this Committee more
than justified them. By a vote of 1128 to 578 the landlords of Ireland
declared themselves in favour of a Conference, and empowered the
Conciliation Committee to nominate representatives on their behalf.
Thus the first stage of the struggle for a settlement by consent was
victoriously carried.
The next stage was the discussion of the terms upon which the
landlords would allow themselves to be expropriated throughout the
length and breadth of the land. Here there were, unfortunately,
violent divergences of opinion on the tenants' side. Mr O'Brien
postulated, as an essential ingredient of any settlement that could
hope for success, that the State should step in with a liberal bonus
to bridge over the difference between what the tenants could afford to
give and the landlords afford to take. When this proposal was first
mooted it was regarded as a counsel of perfection, and Mr O'Brien was
looked upon as a genial visionary or a well-meaning optimist. But
nobody thought it was a demand that the Government or Parliament would
agree to. Happily, however, for the foresight of Mr O'Brien, it was
his much-derided bonus scheme which became the very pivot of the Land
Conference Report.
Meanwhile events were moving rapidly behind the scenes. It was
conveyed to Messrs Redmond, Davitt, Dillon and O'Brien that Mr Wyndham
had offered the Under-Secretaryship for Ireland to Sir Antony
MacDonnell, who had lately retired from the position of Governor of
Bengal. They were told by his brother, Dr Mark Antony MacDonnell, who
was one of the Nationalist members, that Sir Antony was hesitating
much as to his decision. Sir Antony conveyed that he had made it clear
to Mr Wyndham that, as he was an Irish Nationalist and a believer in
self-government, he could not think of going to Ireland to administer
a Coercion regime, and, further, that he favoured a bold and generous
settlement of the University difficulty. Mr Wyndham, it was
understood, had given the necessary assurances, and Sir Antony now
wished it to be conveyed to the Irish leaders that he would not accept
the post against their will or without a certain measure, at least, of
benevolent toleration on their part.
All these happenings foreshadowed a joyous transformation of the
political scene, to the incalculable advantage of those who had made
such a magnificent stand for Irish rights; but the Irish Party was
determined that until rumours had crystallised into realities they
were going to relax none of their extra-constitutional pressure upon
the Government. It was, for instance, resolved to begin the Autumn
Session with a resounding protest against Coercion and to carry on the
conflict in the country more determinedly than ever.
The just and reasonable demand for a day to debate the administration
was unaccountably avoided by the Government, whose reply was that a
day would be granted if the demand came from the official Liberal
Opposition. The Nationalists could not submit to this degradation of
their independent position in Parliament, and when they attempted to
secure their end by a motion for the adjournment of the House they
found that two Irish Unionists had "blocked" them by placing on the
Order Paper certain omnibus resolutions on the state of Ireland. Since
the days of Parnellite obstruction such scenes were not witnessed as
those that followed. The Party defied all rules of law and order,
worried the Government by all sort of lawless interruptions and
irrelevant questions, flagrantly flouted the authority of the chair
and, finally, after a week of Parliamentary anarchy, it was determined
that even more extreme courses would be adopted unless the
constitutional right of Ireland to be heard in the Chamber was
conceded. Hint of this was conveyed to Mr Speaker Gully, who,
regardful of the honour of the House, used his good offices with the
Government to such effect that the blocking motions were incontinently
withdrawn and the discussion in due course took place.
Whilst these developments were taking place Mr O'Brien had taken every
possible precaution to guard himself against any charge of autocracy
in the direction of the movement, whether in Parliament or in the
country. At the request of his colleagues on the Land Conference he
had drafted a Memorandum containing the basis of settlement which
would be acceptable to Nationalist opinion. This was submitted to
Messrs Redmond, Davitt and Sexton, with an urgent entreaty for their
freest criticism or any supplementary suggestions of their own. None
of these could, therefore, complain that Mr O'Brien was attempting to
do anything over their heads. And impartial judgment will declare that
if either Mr Sexton, Mr Dillon or Mr Davitt had views of their own, or
had any vital disagreements with Mr O'Brien's suggestions, now was the
time to declare them. Far from committing himself to any dissent, when
Mr O'Brien, after a fortnight, wrote to Mr Sexton for the return of
his Memorandum, Mr Sexton wrote:
"I have read the Memo. carefully two or three times and now return it
to you as you want to use it and have no other copy. It will take some
time to look into your proposals with anything like sufficient care.
You will hear from me as soon as I think I can say anything that may
possibly be of use."
Be it here noted that Mr Sexton never did communicate, even when he
had looked into Mr O'Brien's proposals "with sufficient care." Later
he waged implacable war on the Land Conference Report and the Land Act
from his commanding position as Managing Director of _The Freeman's
Journal_ (the official National organ). He did so in violation of
the promise on which the Party had entrusted him with that position,
that he would never interfere in its political direction.
Other informal meetings between Sir Antony MacDonnell and the Irish
leaders followed, the purpose of Sir Antony being, before he accepted
office in the Irish Government, to gather the views of leading
Irishmen, especially as to the possibility of a genuine land
settlement, which he regarded as the foundation of all else.
Subsequently it transpired that Mr Sexton had engaged in some
negotiations on his own account with Sir Antony MacDonnell, and it is
not improbable that part at least of his quarrel with the Land
Conference was that the settlement propounded by it superseded and
supplanted his own scheme. Neither Mr O'Brien nor his friends were
made aware of these private pourparlers, entered into without any
vestige of authority from the Party or its leader, and they only
learnt of them casually afterwards. The incident is instructive of how
the path of the peacemaker is ever beset with difficulties, even from
among his own household.
After surmounting a whole host of obstacles the Land Conference at
long last assembled in the Mansion House, Dublin, on 20th December
1902. Mr Redmond submitted the final selection of the tenants'
representatives to a vote of the Irish Party and, with the exception
of one member who declined to vote, the choice fell unanimously upon
those named in Captain Shawe-Taylor's letter. Although their findings
were subsequently subjected to much embittered attack, no one had any
right to impugn their authority, capacity, judgment or intimate
knowledge of the tenants' case.
The landlords' representatives were also fortunately chosen. The Earl
of Dunraven was a man of the most statesmanlike comprehension, whose
high patriotic purpose in all the intervening years has won for him an
enduring and an honourable place in the history of his country. He
strove to imbue his own landlord class with a new vision of their duty
and their destiny, and if only a few of the later converts to the
national claim of Ireland had supported him when he came forward
first, in favour of the policy of national reconciliation, many
chapters of tragedy in our national life would never have been
written. With a close knowledge of his labours and his personality I
can write this of him--that a man more passionately devoted to his
country, more sincerely anxious to serve her highest interests, or
more intrepid in pursuing the courses and supporting the causes he
deems right, does not live. He has been a light in his generation and
to his class, and he deserves well of all men who admire a moral
courage superior to all the shafts of shallow criticism and a
patriotism which undoubtedly seeks the best, as he sees it, for the
benefit of his country. And more than this cannot be said of the
greatest patriot who ever lived. The Earl of Mayo also brought a fine
idealism and high patriotism to the Conference Council Board. He had a
genuine enthusiasm for the development of Irish industries and was the
moving spirit in the Irish Arts and Crafts Exhibitions. Colonel
Hutcheson-Poë, a gallant soldier, who had lost a leg in Kitchener's
Soudan Campaign, a gentleman of sound judgment and excellent sense,
was one of the moderating elements in the Conference. Finally, Colonel
Nugent Everard represented one of the oldest Anglo-Irish families of
the Pale and the author of several projects tending to the betterment
of the people. The tenants' representatives presented a concise list
of their own essential requirements as drafted by Mr O'Brien. It was
as follows:--
BASIS.--ABOLITION OF DUAL OWNERSHIP
1. For landlords, net second-term income, less all outgoings.
2. For occupiers, reduction of not less than 20 per cent. in
second-term rents or first-term correspondingly reduced. Decennial
reductions to be retained.
3. Difference between landlords' terms and occupiers' terms to be made
up by State bonus and reduced interest with, in addition, purchase
money in cash and increased value for resale of mansion and demesne.
4. Complete settlement of evicted tenants' question an indispensable
condition.
5. Special and drastic treatment for all congested districts in the
country (as defined by the Bill of 1902).
6. Sales to be between parties or through official commissioners as
parties would prefer.
7. Non-judicial and future tenants to be admitted.
8. (Query.) Sporting rights to be a matter of agreement.
I do not propose to go into any detailed account of what transpired at
the sittings (six in number) of the Land Conference. All this
information is available in Mr O'Brien's _An Olive Branch in
Ireland_. Suffice it to say that seven out of eight of the tenants'
requirements were conceded outright and the eighth was covered by a
compromise which would have enabled any tenant in the country, whether
non-judicial or future tenants, to become the proprietor of his own
holding on reasonable terms. On 4th January 1903 a unanimous report
was published. The country scarcely expected this, and its joy at this
ever-memorable achievement was correspondingly greater. It was
inconceivable that the landlords should have, in solemn treaty, signed
their own death warrant as territorialists, yet this was the amazing
deed to which they affixed their sign manual when their four
representatives signed the Land Conference Report.
Ever since the first Anglo-Norman set foot in Ireland and began to
despoil the ancient clans of their land there has been trouble in
connection with the Irish Land Question. The new race of landlords
regarded their Irish land purely as a speculation, not as a home; they
were in great part absentees, having no aim in Ireland beyond drawing
their rents. They had no duties to their tenants in the sense that
English landlords have. They had no natural ties with the country and
they regarded themselves as free from all the duties or obligations of
ownership. They never advanced capital for the improvement of the land
or the erection of buildings, and never put a farthing into the
cultivation of the soil. The tenant had to do everything out of his
own sweat and blood--build his home and out-offices, clean and drain
the land, make the fences, lay down the roads and, when he had done
all this and made the property more valuable, his rent was raised on
him, even beyond the value of the improvements he had effected. Woe to
the industrious man, for he was taxed upon his industry! And yet who
is not familiar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers
who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about "the lazy Irish"? And
if they were lazy--which I entirely deny--who made them so? Had they
no justification for their "laziness"? Why should they wear their
lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should live
in riotousness and debauchery in the hells of London or the Continent?
"One could count on one's fingers," said the Cowper Commission in
1887, "the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been
made by the landlord." The Irish landlord class never did a thing for
Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood--to rob and depopulate
and destroy, to make exaction after exaction upon the industry of her
peasants, until their wrongs cried aloud for redress, if not for
vengeance. In England it was estimated in 1897 that the landlord class
had spent in investments in landlord property a sum estimated at
£700,000,000. These can justly claim some right in the land. In
Ireland the landlord was simply the owner of "the raw earth"--the bare
proprietor of the soil, a dead weight upon the industry and honest
toil of the tenant, receiving a rent upon the values that the labour
and the energy of generations of members of a particular family had
created. The Irish landlord and his horde of hangers-on--his agents,
his bailiffs, his process-servers, his bog-rangers, his
rent-warners--created a system built upon corruption, maintained in
tyranny, and enforced with all the ruthless severities of foreign laws
enacted solely for the benefit of England's garrison. "I can imagine
no fault," said Mr Arthur Balfour, speaking as Prime Minister in the
House of Commons, 4th May 1903, "attaching to any land system which
does not attach to the Irish system." Evictions in Ireland came to be
known as "sentences of death," so cruel and numerous were they until
the popular agitation was strong enough to check them.
Even the Gladstonian legislation of 1881, though it admittedly did
something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord
and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as "the three
F.'s "--viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale--yet left the
question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no
doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants'
point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and
unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent farming, since
the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who
examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw
them. True, the tenant could claim for his improvements, but in
practice this was no real safeguard. The more industrious the tenant
the higher the rent--the less industrious and the less capable the
lower the figure to be paid.
Hence, after the failure of countless Acts of Parliament, it was borne
in upon all earnest land-reformers that there could be only one final
and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual
ownership--in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the
establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed ownership of
the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made
in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885--called, after its
author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense
success, for in six years the ten millions sterling assigned for its
operations were exhausted and 25,867 tenants had been turned into
owners of their farms.
It became clear that a scheme of purchase which would, within a
definite period, root out the last vestige of landlordism was the one
only real and true solution for the land problem. And now, blessed
day, and glory to the eyes that had lived to see it, and undying
honour to the men whose genius and sacrifices had made it possible,
the decree had gone forth that end there must be to landlordism. And,
wonder of wonders, the landlords themselves had agreed to the fiat
decreeing their own extinction as a ruling caste. It was with
heartfelt hope and relief, and with the sense of a great victory
achieved, that the country received the wondrous news of the success
of the Land Conference. The dawn of a glorious promise had broken
through the long night of Ireland's suffering, but the mischief-makers
were already at work to see that the noonday sun of happiness did not
shine too strongly or too steadily.