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“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 c.o.c.k-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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sertion. 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 a.s.serted that the Government turned tail and fled before these “delegates”) teem with a.n.a.logous a.s.sertions 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 t.i.tle 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 circ.u.mstances 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s of peaceable, self-respecting, law-abiding citizens. On the other it will lower the general standard by doing away with that better cla.s.s of resident gentry and capitalized landowners, who in their way are guides, teachers and helps to the peasantry. The absence of this better cla.s.s 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 superst.i.tious, 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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, st.u.r.dy, 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 chast.i.ty, but it winks at murder; it demands money for ma.s.ses 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 sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, and all sorts and conditions of Protestant bullies and tyrants sent up pet.i.tions 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 a.s.serts–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 n.o.ble 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 bunk.u.m–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 d.a.m.nable 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, n.o.ble-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 amus.e.m.e.nt, save in heated politics and drink; bogs here, unthrift there, small holdings everywhere–all these things help to complicate a question which pa.s.sion has already made too difficult for even the most radical kind of statesmanship to adjust. All the panaceas. .h.i.therto 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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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 d.a.m.natory evidence that they are utterly unfit for practical power. Governed by hysterical pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionless 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.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “STANDARD.”
“Sir,–People in England, whatever political party they belong to, should glance at what is now going on in the town of Tipperary before finally making up their minds to hand over Ireland body and soul to the National League. No country town in Ireland–I think I may add or in England either–was more prosperous three months ago than Tipperary. The centre of a rich and prosperous part of the country, surrounded by splendid land, it had an enormous trade in b.u.t.ter and all agricultural produce, and a large monthly pig and cattle fair was held there. It possessed (I use the past tense advisedly) a number of excellent shops, doing a splendid business, and to the eyes of those who could look back a few years it was making rapid progress in prosperity every year.
“All is changed now. Many of the shops are closed and deserted, others will follow their example shortly; the b.u.t.ter market has been removed from the town, the cattle fairs have fallen to half their former size.
One sees shopkeepers, but a short time back doing capital business, walking about idle in the streets, with their shops closed; armed policemen at every corner are necessary to prevent a savage rabble from committing outrages, and many people avoid going near the town at all. All this is the result of William O’Brien’s speech in Tipperary and the subsequent action of the National League. The town and whole neighbourhood were perfectly quiet till one day Mr. O’Brien descends on it like an evil spirit, and tells the shopkeepers and surrounding farmers that they are to dictate to their landlords how to act in a case not affecting them at all. For fear, however, of not sufficiently arousing them for the cause of others, he suggests that, in addition to dictating to the landlord what his conduct shall be elsewhere, all his tenants, farmers and shopkeepers alike, shall demand a reduction of 25 per cent, on their own rents. As to the farmers’ reduction I will say nothing; if they wished it, they could go into the Land Court, and if rented too high could get a reduction, retrospectively from the day their application was lodged. The reduction, however, that the shopkeepers were advised–nay, ordered–to ask for must have surprised them more than their landlord. Many of them, at their existing rents, had piled up considerable fortunes in a few years; others had enlarged their premises, doubled their business, and thriven in every way; nevertheless, they had to obey. The landlord naturally refused to be dictated to by his tenants in matters not affecting them; he also refused to reduce the rents of men who in a few years had made fortunes, and some of whom were commonly reputed to be worth thousands. Legal proceedings were then commenced, and the tenants’ interests were put up to auction. Some of the most thriving shopkeepers declined to let their tenancies, out of which they had done so well, be sold; others, in fear of personal violence and outrage, not unusual results of disobeying the League, did allow them to be knocked down for nominal sums to the landlord’s representative.
Let lovers of liberty and fair-play watch what followed. All the shopkeepers who bought in their interests were rigorously boycotted; men who had had a large weekly turnover now saw their shops absolutely deserted. Plate-gla.s.s windows that would not have shamed Regent Street, were smashed to atoms by hired ruffians of the League, and the shopkeepers themselves and their families had to be protected from the mob by armed police, placed round their houses night and day.
All this because they desired to keep their flourishing businesses, instead of sacrificing them in a quarrel not their own.