Are the English so strong, so sure of their power, so thoroughly
convinced of their superiority that they can afford to display so much
disdain toward a great nation? Truly, the sun does not set on the
possessions of the Empress of India, who counts millions of subjects in
five parts of the world; but is this necessarily a sign of strength? The
power of Charles V. encompassed the world, and we all know what became
of his vast empire. But we foresee the objection to this comparison. It
is that the power of Charles V. and Philip II. was mined by a secret and
almost invisible enemy--an idea, a principle--liberty of conscience--and
that Queen Victoria is not menaced by any such enemy. Indeed! But a
small fact--the assassination of an Irishman of the most ignoble
kind--affords ample food for reflection, and cannot fail to inspire
grave doubts regarding the solidity of the British Empire. In spite of
all the efforts of the English police, Carey, their unworthy protege,
was tracked, seized, and slain by a secret power. The Government of
Queen Victoria, with all its resources, was not able to find a corner of
the globe, however remote, where the life of the informer could be
beyond the reach of the Irish counter-police.
The thing that renders this secret power so dreadful is that it exists
wherever the Empress of India has subjects. In every English city, in
every English colony, at the Cape, in Australia, in Canada as in India,
in China as in America, in France as in Japan, wherever a British
tourist travels, wherever an English missionary preaches, wherever an
English merchant trades, the secret Irish enemy lurks ready to
assassinate if he receives the order. The English may laugh at him or
may become exasperated by him; but if England should become engaged in a
foreign war could she consider without a shudder the incalculable
dangers to which this enemy within might expose her--an enemy that will
stop at nothing, that nothing can terrify, for he offers his life as a
sacrifice, and that nothing can reconcile, for he is the personification
of deadly hatred? For our part we know well that if France held within
her borders millions, or even thousands, of men animated by such a
spirit we would tremble for the future of our country.
But besides this irreconcilable Ireland that is everywhere, that sits in
Parliament and there makes and unmakes majorities, and consequently
cabinets, and that would betray the nation, if it saw fit, even in the
centre of the national representation, it seems to us that the
Australian colonies also are likely one day to take a notion to become
independent; that the colonies in Southern Africa are rapidly becoming
disaffected; that the inhabitants of India are demanding autonomy in a
tone that would become very menacing if Russia should come nearer to
Cabul--and she is plainly enough moving in that direction; and that
Egypt is beginning to get restless and to show herself a little
ungrateful, as if she cannot clearly understand the utterly
disinterested intentions of Lord Dufferin. What would England do if upon
two or three of these territories revolts should come simultaneously?
The thing may be improbable, but not impossible. And what would England
do if, taking advantage of these revolts, a great European power should
declare war against her? What would she have done in 1857 if Russia had
been in a position to give assistance to Nana Saib? Such things have
been seen in history.
To face such dangers--the danger of war, the danger of revolt, the
danger of conspiracy--a large army composed of the most steadfast troops
would be necessary. Where can England get that army? Her present forces
are hardly sufficient in time of peace. She finds it impossible to
retain the old soldiers in her service. A sufficient number of recruits
cannot be obtained to fill up the gaps, and it appears to be impossible
to stop the desertions that are constantly thinning the ranks. In vain
the pay of the soldier is raised. The English workman refuses to enlist.
It is, then, to the Irishman that recourse must be had. Trust that
Irishman!
The British Government is unable to raise an army of more than three
hundred thousand men, counting the Indian troops, whose fidelity is,
perhaps, not beyond all suspicion; and three hundred thousand soldiers
to defend an empire the most populous and the most widely scattered that
has ever been seen on the face of the globe count for very little. Of
course, there is the fleet, which is superb. But what could the fleet do
against an enemy invading India by land? Of what use was it against the
Boers or against Cetywayo? Of what use would it be against even a very
inferior fleet that used torpedos as the Russians did on the Danube?
All these things considered, it seems to us that if the English would
calmly consider their own situation they would become less arrogant in
their international relations. We don't ask any more of them, for we
have no desire to obtain from them any service whatsoever. We wish
simply to be able to live with them and with their government on terms
of courteous politeness.
_Republique Francaise_
* * * * *
M. Gounod, when lately at Reims, had been asked by the Archbishop to
compose a Mass in honor of Joan of Arc. Some further details have since
reached us as to the offer and acceptance of the happy suggestion. M.
Gounod declared that he would compose within the year not a Mass, but a
cantata on the life and martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans, the words to
be drawn from Holy Scripture. He said, moreover, that his hope would be
to return to Reims and to compose the music--the spirituality,
tenderness, and animation of which all lovers of Gounod will seem to
feel in advance--in the cathedral itself and close to the altar where
the blessed and miraculous young creature knelt in tears to offer her
victory to God.
Ireland: A Retrospect.
In the early days of the Land League, the cry throughout Ireland was for
compulsory sale of the landlords' interest to the State at twenty years'
purchase of the valuation, the occupiers to become tenants of the
government for a fixed number of years until their yearly payments had
cleared off both the principal and interest of the sum advanced to the
landlords. Famine had made its appearance in many parts of the country,
and the peasantry would be glad to be rid of the incubus of landlordism
at any cost. The landlords scoffed at the proposal, and it was well for
the tenants that they did not accept it. Foreign competition was but
then in its infancy, and the prices of agricultural produce were not
going down by leaps and bounds as they have been in 1884 and 1885. The
yearly instalments the tenantry would have to pay to the State could not
be met out of the produce of the land at present prices, if twenty
years' purchase of Griffith's valuation had been accepted by the
landlords. At the present time the majority of tenants in Ireland (and
perhaps in England), taking into consideration the depression in
agriculture, and the probable higher taxation of land in the near
future, would think fifteen years' purchase too much for the fee simple
of the land. It is pretty certain that when the land question comes to
be finally settled, very few Irish landlords' interests can realize more
than fifteen years' purchase on the valuation. In 1880, they were, with
few exceptions, blind to the changes going on at their very doors, and
struck out for their old rack-rents by threats of eviction and law
proceedings. Instead of meeting their tenantry half way, they set the
crow-bar brigade to work, and the numbers evicted were so appalling,
that Mr. Parnell's party prevailed on the late government to pass
through the Commons the Compensation for Disturbance Act, the result of
which would be to suspend all evictions until a Land Bill was passed.
But the landlords got their friends in the House of Lords to throw out
the bill, and kept on impressing on the late government the necessity
for coercion. The effect of the action of the Lords was stupefying on
the middle classes, who saw that the last chance of a peaceable
settlement was gone, and the half-starved peasantry were stung to
madness at the thought of the revival of the eviction scenes of 1847 and
1848. Then sprung up a crop of outrages which became systematic where
they had been isolated, and the agrarian war was really upon us.
The landlords proceeded with their evictions, and the peasantry
retaliated by outrage until the Liberal government, having failed to
pass their ameliorative measure, was forced to have recourse to
coercion. The first Coercion Act of the Liberals was passed before the
Land Bill, and thus Ireland was whipped first and caudled afterwards.
Mr. Forster "ran in" his twelve hundred Suspects, and the result was an
increased crop of outrages, and that the Invincibles lay in wait twenty
times to murder him. The Suspects were generally the more respectable of
the middle classes in the villages and towns--men whose interest it was
to check outrage--who were marked down by the finger of landlordism as
sympathizers with their brethren on the land. Then came the suppression
of the Land League (1881), and the retaliating No-Rent Manifesto, which
was not generally obeyed--chiefly through the influence of religion.
There was suppressed anger and hatred of the ruling class throughout the
land, and the people would not assist the police (who attacked their
meetings and bludgeoned or stabbed them into submission) in tracking
murderers or incendiaries. All this time the landlords kept on evicting,
and calling through the English Press for still sterner repression of
the right of public meeting, and the result was that secret societies
multiplied and flourished. Religious influences could cope with a
No-Rent Manifesto, but were almost powerless in grappling with secret
societies. If the late Cardinal McCabe denounced them in the Cathedral,
a large portion of the congregation rose up ostentatiously and withdrew.
The voices of the national leaders who had restrained the people were
gagged--Davitt in Portland, Parnell in Kilmainham. Things were going
from bad to worse; the tension of public feelings was growing tighter
day by day; the landlords were evicting apace and gloating over their
victims, and saw not that such a state of siege could not last forever.
And it appears Mr. Forster was so infatuated as to believe that it
needed only a few months more of his stern rule to break the spirit of
the Irish people. A glimmering of the true state of affairs had,
however, begun to dawn upon his colleagues, and Mr. Forster succumbed at
last to the incessant attacks of the remnant of the Nationalist members,
who did not give him a chance of depriving them of their liberty by
setting foot in Ireland, and to the vigorous criticism of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_.
The Suspects were released and there was joy throughout Ireland. People
began to breath freely once more; for the reign of landlord terror and
peasant outrage seemed to draw near its close. The Land Act of 1880 had
begun to inspire the tenantry with hope, especially as the first
decisions of the commissioners gave sweeping reductions off the rents
hitherto paid. In May, 1882, things were looking brighter. It seemed as
if the Liberals had repented them of coercion, and that conciliation was
to be tried in Ireland. But the Invincibles, for whose creation Mr.
Forster's regime seems to be especially responsible, were not to be
placated so easily. The Phoenix Park butchery had already been
planned, and it was carried out with fiendish determination. The
civilized world was horror stricken. The cup of peace was dashed from
the lips of Ireland, and a cry of rage and despair resounded throughout
the country. It was heard from pulpit and platform, and echoed through
the Press of every shade of opinion. Many good men thought that now
England's opportunity for gaining the affections of the Irish people had
come at last; that by trusting to the horror of the Irish race for so
dastardly a crime, its perpetrators would be brought to the bar of
justice, and the victims avenged. But it was not to be so. In England
the general public seemed to believe that the Irish were a demon race,
who deserved to be chastised with scorpions, and knowing what was the
state of the public mind in Ireland after the Phoenix Park
assassinations, it would be hard to blame Englishmen for thinking as
they did in the face of such an appalling crime. The blood of Lord Fred.
Cavendish called aloud for vengeance, and the government passed the
Prevention of Crimes Act, the most severe of all the Coercion Statutes.
It was a mistake to treat Ireland as if she sympathized with the
Phoenix Park butchery. Under the Crimes Act we had secret
inquisitions, informer manufacture by means of enormous bribes, swearing
away of the lives of innocent men by wretches, who were the scum of
society, jury packing to a degree unknown since 1848, conviction by
drunken juries, and even the starting of secret societies by ruffians
who were in the pay of the Executive.
The people quickly lapsed into their old indifference as to aiding an
executive which used such base means of governing. It mattered little
that Earl Spencer's personal character was above suspicion. Under his
rule the lives and liberties of honest men were taken away by juries
packed with landlords, or their partisans, on the testimony of hired or
terrified wretches, who were generally the most guilty of the gangs that
were banded together for unlawful purposes during the land war. Earl
Spencer ruled by means which must necessarily have involved innocent men
in the punishment of the guilty, and his name is the best hated of all
the bad viceroys that ever ruled Ireland.