word which, I suspect, is scarcely known in any other civilized country.
It is a country from which thousands of families have been driven by the
will of the landowners and the power of the law. It is a country where
have existed, to a great extent, those dread tribunals known by the
common name of secret societies, by which, in pursuit of what some men
have thought to be justice, there have been committed crimes of
appalling guilt in the eye of the whole world. It is a country, too, in
which--and it is the only Christian country of which it may be said for
some centuries past--it is a country in which a famine of the most
desolating character has prevailed even during our own time. I think I
was told in 1849, as I stood in the burial-ground at Skibbereen, that at
least 400 people who had died of famine were buried within the quarter
of an acre of ground on which I was then looking. It is a country, too,
from which there has been a greater emigration by sea within a given
time than has been known at any time from any other country in the
world. It is a country where there has been, for generations past, a
general sense of wrong, out of which has grown a state of chronic
insurrection; and at this very moment when I speak, the general
safeguard of constitutional liberty is withdrawn, and we meet in this
hall, and I speak here tonight, rather by the forbearance and permission
of the Irish executive than under the protection of the common
safeguards of the rights and liberties of the people of the United
Kingdom.
I venture to say that this is a miserable and a humiliating picture to
draw of this country. Bear in mind that I am not speaking of Poland
suffering under the conquest of Russia. There is a gentleman, now a
candidate for an Irish county, who is very great upon the wrongs of
Poland; but I have found him always in the House of Commons taking sides
with that great party which has systematically supported the wrongs of
Ireland. I am not speaking about Hungary, or of Venice as she was under
the rule of Austria, or of the Greeks under the dominion of the Turk,
but I am speaking of Ireland--part of the United Kingdom--part of that
which boasts itself to be the most civilized and the most Christian
nation in the world. I took the liberty recently, at a meeting in
Glasgow, to say that I believed it was impossible for a class to govern
a great nation wisely and justly. Now, in Ireland there has been a field
in which all the principles of the Tory party have had their complete
experiment and development. You have had the country gentleman in all
his power. You have had any number of Acts of Parliament which the
ancient Parliament of Ireland or the Parliament of the United Kingdom
could give him. You have had the Established Church supported by the
law, even to the extent, not many years ago, of collecting its revenues
by the aid of military force. In point of fact, I believe it would be
impossible to imagine a state of things in which the principles of the
Tory party have had a more entire and complete opportunity for their
trial than they have had within the limits of this island. And yet what
has happened? This, surely. That the kingdom has been continually
weakened--that the harmony of the empire has been disturbed, and that
the mischief has not been confined to the United Kingdom, but has spread
to the Colonies. And at this moment, as we know by every arrival from
the United States, the colony of Canada is exposed to danger of
invasion--that it is forced to keep on foot soldiers which it otherwise
would not want, and to involve itself in expenses which threaten to be
ruinous to its financial condition, and all that it may defend itself
from Irishmen hostile to England who are settled in the United States.
In fact, the Government of Lord Derby at this moment is doing exactly
that which the Government of Lord North did nearly a hundred years ago--
it is sending out troops across the Atlantic to fight Irishmen who are
the bitter enemies of England on the American continent. Now, I believe
every gentleman in this room will admit that all that I have said is
literally true. And if it be true, what conclusion are we to come to? Is
it that the law which rules in Ireland is bad, but the people good; or
that the law is good, but the people bad? Now, let us, if we can, get
rid for a moment of Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Protestantism, and
Orangeism on the one hand, and of Catholicism, Romanism, and Ultra-
montanism on the other,--let us for a moment get beyond all these
'isms,' and try if we can discover what it is that is the great evil in
your country. I shall ask you only to turn your eye upon two points--the
first is the Established Church, and the second is the tenure of land.
The Church may be said to affect the soul and sentiment of the country,
and the land question may be said to affect the means of life and the
comforts of the people.
I shall not blame the bishops and clergy of the Established Church.
There may be, and I doubt not there are amongst them, many pious and
devoted men, who labour to the utmost of their power to do good in the
district which is committed to their care; but I venture to say this,
that if they were all good and all pious, it would not in a national
point of view compensate for this one fatal error--the error of their
existence as the ministers of an Established Protestant Church in
Ireland. Every man of them is necessarily in his district a symbol of
the supremacy of the few and of the subjection of the many; and although
the amount of the revenue of the Established Church as the sum payable
by the whole nation may not be considerable, yet bear in mind that it is
often the galling of the chain which is more tormenting than the weight
of it. I believe that the removal of the Established Church would create
a new political and social atmosphere in Ireland--that it would make the
people feel that old things had passed away--that all things had become
new--that an Irishman and his faith were no longer to be condemned in
his own country--and that for the first time the English people and the
English Parliament intended to do full justice to Ireland.
Now, leaving the Established Church, I come to the question of the land.
I have said that the ownership of the land in Ireland came originally
from conquest and from confiscation, and, as a matter of course, there
was created a great gulf between the owner and the occupier, and from
that time to this doubtless there has been wanting that sympathy which
exists to a large extent in Great Britain, and that ought to exist in
every country. I am told--you can answer it if I am wrong--that it is
not common in Ireland now to give leases to tenants, especially to
Catholic tenants. If that be so, then the security for the property of
the tenant rests only upon the good feeling and favour of the owner of
the land, for the laws, as we know, have been made by the landowners,
and many propositions for the advantage of the tenants have
unfortunately been too little considered by Parliament. The result is
that you have bad farming, bad dwelling-houses, bad temper, and
everything bad connected with the occupation and cultivation of land in
Ireland. One of the results--a result the most appalling--is this, that
your population are fleeing from your country and seeking a refuge in a
distant land. On this point I wish to refer to a letter which I received
a few days ago from a most esteemed citizen of Dublin. He told me that
he believed that a very large portion of what he called the poor,
amongst Irishmen, sympathized with any scheme or any proposition that
was adverse to the Imperial Government. He said further, that the people
here are rather in the country than of it, and that they are looking
more to America than they are looking to England. I think there is a
good deal in that. When we consider how many Irishmen have found a
refuge in America, I do not know how we can wonder at that statement.
You will recollect that when the ancient Hebrew prophet prayed in his
captivity he prayed with his window opened towards Jerusalem. You know
that the followers of Mahommed, when they pray, turn their faces towards
Mecca. When the Irish peasant asks for food, and freedom, and blessing,
his eye follows the setting sun; the aspirations of his heart reach
beyond the wide Atlantic, and in spirit he grasps hands with the great
Republic of the West. If this be so, I say, then, that the disease is
not only serious, but it is even desperate; but desperate as it is, I
believe there is a certain remedy for it, if the people and the
Parliament of the United Kingdom are willing to apply it. Now, if it
were possible, would it not be worth while to change the sentiments and
improve the condition of the Irish cultivators of the soil? If we were
to remove the State Church, there would still be a Church, but it would
not be a supremacy Church. The Catholics of Ireland have no idea of
saying that Protestantism in its various forms shall not exist in their
island. There would still be a Church, but it would be a free Church of
a section of a free people. I will not go into details about the change.
Doubtless every man would say that the present occupants of the livings
should not, during their lifetime, be disturbed; but if the principle of
the abolition of the State Church were once fixed and accepted, it would
not be difficult to arrange the details that would be satisfactory to
the people of Ireland.
Who objects to this? The men who are in favour of supremacy, and the men
who have a fanatical hatred of what they call Popery. To honest and good
men of the Protestant Church and of the Protestant faith there is no
reason whatever to fear this change. What has the voluntary system done
in Scotland? What has it done amongst the Nonconformists of England?
What has it done amongst the population of Wales? and what has it done
amongst the Catholic population of your own Ireland? In my opinion, the
abolition of the Established Church would give Protestantism itself
another chance. I believe there has been in Ireland no other enemy of
Protestantism so injurious as the Protestant State Establishment. It has
been loaded for two hundred years with the sins of bad government and
bad laws, and whatever may have been the beauty and the holiness of its
doctrine or of its professors, it has not been able to hold its ground,
loaded as it has been by the sins of a bad government. One effect of the
Established Church has been this, the making Catholicism in Ireland not
only a faith but a patriotism, for it was not likely that any member of
the Catholic Church would incline in the slightest degree to
Protestantism so long as it presented itself to his eyes as a wrong-doer
and full of injustice in connection with the government of his country.
But if honest Protestantism has nothing to fear from the changes that I
would recommend, what has the honest landowner to fear? The history of
Europe and America for the last one hundred years affords scarcely any
picture more painful than that which is afforded by the landowners of
this kingdom. The Irish landowner has been different from every other
landowner, for the bulk of his land has only been about half cultivated,
and he has had to collect his rents by a process approaching the evils
of civil war. His property has been very insecure--the sale of it
sometimes has been rendered impossible. The landowner himself has often
been hated by those who ought to have loved him. He has been banished
from his ancestral home by terror, and not a few have lost their lives
without the sympathy of those who ought to have been their protectors
and their friends. I would like to ask, what can be much worse than
this? If in this country fifty years ago, as in Prussia, there had
arisen statesmen who would have taken one-third or one-half the land
from the landowners of Ireland, and made it over to their tenants, I
believe that the Irish landowner, great as would have been the injustice
of which he might have complained, would in all probability have been
richer and happier than he has been.
What is the first remedy which you would propose? Clearly this--that
which is the most easily applicable and which would most speedily touch
the condition of the country. It is this--that the property which the
tenant shall invest or create in his farm shall be secured to the tenant
by law. I believe that if Parliament were fairly to enact this it would
make a change in the whole temper of the country. I recollect in the
year 1849 being down in the county of Wexford. I called at the house of
an old farmer of the name of Stafford, who lived in a very good house,
the best farm-house, I think, that I had seen since leaving Dublin. He
lived on his own farm, which he had bought fifteen years before. The
house was a house which he had himself built. He was a venerable old
man, and we had some very interesting conversation with him. I asked how
it was he had so good a house? He said the farm was his own, and the
house was his own, and, as no man could disturb him, he had made it a
much better house than was common for the farmers of Ireland. I said to
him, 'If all the farmers of Ireland had the same security for the
capital they laid out on their farms, what would be the result?' The old
man almost sprang out of his chair, and said, 'Sir, if you will give us
that encouragement, we will _bate_ the hunger out of Ireland.' It
is said that all this must be left to contract between the landlord and
the tenant; but the public, which may be neither landlord nor tenant,
has a great interest in this question; and I maintain that the interests
of the public require that Parliament should secure to the tenant the
property which he has invested in his farm. But I would not stop here.
There is another, and what I should call a more permanent and far-
reaching remedy for the evils of Ireland, and those persons who stickle
so much for political economy I hope will follow me in this. The great
evil of Ireland is this--that the Irish people--the Irish nation--are
dispossessed of the soil, and what we ought to do is to provide for, and
aid in, their restoration to it by all measures of justice. Why should
we tolerate in Ireland the law of primogeniture? Why should we tolerate
the system of entails? Why should the object of the law be to accumulate
land in great masses in few hands, and to make it almost impossible for
persons of small means, and tenant-farmers, to become possessors of
land? If you go to other countries--for example, to Norway, to Denmark,
to Holland, to Belgium, to France, to Germany, to Italy, or to the
United States, you will find that in all these countries those laws of
which I complain have been abolished, and the land is just as free to
buy and sell, and hold and cultivate, as any other description of
property in the kingdom. No doubt your Landed Estates Court and your
Record of Titles Act were good measures, but they were good because they
were in the direction that I want to travel farther in.
But I would go farther than that; I would deal with the question of
absenteeism. I am not going to propose to tax absentees; but if my
advice were taken, we should have a Parliamentary Commission empowered
to buy up the large estates in Ireland belonging to the English
nobility, for the purpose of selling them on easy terms to the occupiers
of the farms and to the tenantry of Ireland. Now, let me be fairly
understood. I am not proposing to tax absentees; I am not proposing to
take any of their property from them; but I propose this, that a
Parliamentary Commission should be empowered to treat for the purchase
of those large estates with a view of selling them to the tenantry of
Ireland. Now, here are some of them--the present Prime Minister Lord
Derby, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Hertford, the
Marquis of Bath, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire, and many
others. They have estates in Ireland; many of them, I dare say, are just
as well managed as any other estates in the country; but what you want
is to restore to Ireland a middle-class proprietary of the soil; and I
venture to say that if these estates could be purchased and could be
sold out farm by farm to the tenant occupiers in Ireland, that it would
be infinitely better in a conservative sense, than that they should
belong to great proprietors living out of the country.
I have said that the disease is desperate, and that the remedy must be
searching. I assert that the present system of government with regard to
the Church and with regard to the land has failed disastrously in
Ireland. Under it Ireland has become an object of commiseration to the
whole world, and a discredit to the United Kingdom, of which it forms a
part. It is a land of many sorrows. Men fight for supremacy, and call it
Protestantism; they fight for evil and bad laws, and they call it acting
for the defence of property. Now, are there no good men in Ireland of
those who are generally opposed to us in politics--are there none who
can rise above the level of party? If there be such, I wish my voice
might reach them. I have often asked myself whether patriotism is dead
in Ireland. Cannot all the people of Ireland see that the calamities of
their country are the creatures of the law, and if that be so, that just
laws only can remove these calamities?
If Irishmen were united--if your 105 Members were for the most part
agreed, you might do almost anything that you liked--you might do it
even in the present Parliament; but if you are disunited, then I know
not how you can gain anything from a Parliament created as the Imperial
Parliament is now. The classes who rule in Britain will hear your cry as
they have heard it before, and will pay no attention to it. They will
see your people leaving your shores, and they will think it no calamity
to the country. They know that they have force to suppress insurrection,
and, therefore, you can gain nothing from their fears. What, then, is
your hope? It is in a better Parliament, representing fairly the United
Kingdom--the movement which is now in force in England and Scotland, and
which is your movement as much as ours. If there were 100 more Members,
the representatives of large and free constituencies, then your cry
would be heard, and the people would give you that justice which a class
has so long denied you. The great party that is now in power--the Tory
party--denies that you have any just cause of complaint.
In a speech delivered the other day in Belfast, much was said of the
enforcement of the law; but there was nothing said about any change or
amendment in the law. With this party terror is their only specific,--
they have no confidence in allegiance except where there is no power to
rebel. Now, I differ from these men entirely. I believe that at the root
of a general discontent there is in all countries a general grievance
and general suffering. The surface of society is not incessantly
disturbed without a cause. I recollect in the poem of the greatest of
Italian poets, he tells us that as he saw in vision the Stygian lake,
and stood upon its banks, he observed the constant commotion upon the
surface of the pool, and his good instructor and guide explained to him
the cause of it--
'This, too, for certain know, that underneath
The water dwells a multitude, whose sighs
Into these bubbles make the surface heave,
As thine eye tells thee wheresoe'er it turn.'
And I say in Ireland for generations back, that the misery and the
wrongs of the people have made their sign, and have found a voice in
constant insurrection and disorder. I have said that Ireland is a
country of many wrongs and of many sorrows. Her past lies almost all in
shadow. Her present is full of anxiety and peril. Her future depends on
the power of her people to substitute equality and justice for
supremacy, and a generous patriotism for the spirit of faction. In the
effort now making in Great Britain to create a free representation of
the people you have the deepest interest. The people never wish to
suffer, and they never wish to inflict injustice. They have no sympathy
with the wrong-doer, whether in Great Britain or in Ireland; and when
they are fairly represented in the Imperial Parliament, as I hope they
will one day be, they will speedily give an effective and final answer
to that old question of the Parliament of Kilkenny--'How comes it to
pass that the King has never been the richer for Ireland?'
* * * * *
IRELAND.
VII.
DUBLIN, NOVEMBER 2, 1866.
[This speech was spoken at a public meeting held in Dublin, at which an
Address from the Trades was presented to Mr. Bright. James Haughton,
Esq., was in the Chair.]
When I came to your city I was asked if I would attend a public meeting
on the question of Parliamentary Reform. I answered that I was not in
good order for much speaking, for I have suffered, as I am afraid you
will find before I come to the end of my speech, from much cold and
hoarseness; but it was urged upon me that there were at least some, and
not an inconsiderable number, of the working men of this city who would
be glad if I would meet them; and it was proposed to offer me some
address of friendship and confidence such as that which has been read. I
have no complaint to make of it but this, that whilst I do not say it
indicates too much kindness, yet that it colours too highly the small
services which I have been able to render to any portion of my
countrymen. Your countrymen are reckoned generally to be a people of
great gratitude and of much enthusiasm, and, therefore, I accept the
Address with all the kindness and feelings of friendship with which it
has been offered, and I hope it will be, at least in some degree, a
stimulant to me, in whatever position of life I am placed, to remember,
as I have ever in past times remembered, the claims of the people of
this island to complete and equal justice with the people of Great
Britain.
Now, there may be persons in this room, I should be surprised if there
were not, who doubt whether it is worth their while even to hope for
substantial justice, as this address says, from a Parliament sitting in
London. If there be such a man in this room let him understand that I am
not the man to condemn him or to express surprise at the opinion at
which he has arrived. But I would ask him in return for that, that he
would give me at least for a few minutes a patient hearing, and he will
find that, whether justice may come from the north or the south, or the
east or the west, I, at any rate, stand as a friend of the most complete
justice to the people of this island. When discussing the question of
Parliamentary Reform, I have often heard it asserted that the people of
Ireland, and I am not speaking of those who are hopeless of good from a
Parliament in London, but that the people of Ireland generally imagine
that the question of Parliamentary Reform has very little importance for
them. Now I undertake to say, and I think I can make it clear to this
meeting, that whatever be the importance of that question to any man in
England or Scotland, if the two islands are to continue under Imperial
Parliamentary Government, it is of more importance to every Irishman.
You know that the Parliament of which I am a Member contains 658
Members, of whom 105 cross the Channel from Ireland, and when they go to
London they meet--supposing all the Members of the House of Commons are
gathered together--553 Members who are returned for Great Britain. Now,
suppose that all your 105 Members were absolutely good and honourable
representatives of the people of Ireland--I will not say Tories, or
Whigs, or Radicals, or Repealers, but anything you like,--let every man
imagine that all these Members were exactly the sort of men he would
wish to go from Ireland,--when the 105 arrive in London they meet with
the 553 who are returned from Great Britain. Now, suppose that the
system of Parliamentary representation in Great Britain is very bad,
that it represents very few persons in that great island, and that those
who appear to be represented are distributed in the small boroughs over
different parts of the country, and in the counties under the thumb and
finger of the landlords, it is clear that the whole Parliament, although
your 105 Members may be very good men, must still be a very bad
Parliament. Therefore, if any man imagines--and I should think no man
can imagine--that the representation of the people in Ireland is in a
very good state--still, if he fancies it is in a good state--unless the
representation of Great Britain were at least equally good, you might
have a hundred excellent Irish Members in Parliament at Westminster; but
the whole 658 Members might be a very bad Parliament for the United
Kingdom.