Irish History and the Irish Question

XIII

Daniel O’Connell, whose figure fills the next page in Irish history, was a Dublin barrister who, having gained a unique reputation as a skilful or more than skilful winner of verdicts, passed from the forensic to the political field. He was of pure Irish blood, Irish in physiognomy, typically Irish in character. Nature had endowed him with all the gifts of a popular leader, bodily as well as mental; for he had a voice of unrivalled power and compass as well as extraordinary tact in dealing with the masses and skill in the conduct of agitation. His oratory was such as never failed to tell with his Irish audience, while its violent exaggeration, its disregard of truth and offensiveness of expression too often excited the just resentment of those whom he assailed and repelled all moderate and right-minded men. At the same time he knew how to play the courtier, as he showed when George IV. visited Ireland. He entered public life without the blessing of the veteran Grattan, who accused him of setting afloat the bad passions of the people, venting calumny against Great Britain, and making politics a trade. That his motives were mixed is probable. But of his Irish patriotism there could be no doubt. O’Connell was a most devout Catholic, enjoyed the hearty confidence of the priesthood, and was able to make full use of its influence in calling out and marshalling the people. He thus opened a new era in the history of Irish agitation. In return, he supported the priesthood in its extreme pretensions; notably in defeating a proposal for the admission of Catholics to political power subject to securities for the loyalty of their Church which conflicted with high priestly pretensions, though it had been favourably entertained at Rome. It was on this point that he and Grattan broke. O’Connell, with the aid of his priestly fuglemen, formed a great Catholic association to overawe the government. On the other side, the Orangemen, now heartily Unionist, rushed to arms. A fierce conflict ensued in Ireland, with some danger to the peace. In the course of it the Duke of York, heir presumptive to the Crown, electrified the country and filled the heart of Eldon and true blue Protestantism with joy by a solemn declaration that if he became king he would veto Catholic emancipation. After trying his power by carrying some elections, O’Connell determined to bring the conflict to a head by himself standing for Parliament in defiance of the law by which, as a Catholic, he was excluded. He carried his election for Clare against the candidate of the gentry by the votes of the Catholic peasantry, the forty-shilling freeholders; the influence of the Church with its sacraments being openly employed in his support. Peel and Wellington now gave way and carried the admission of the Catholics to Parliament, only tempering the shock to their Tory supporters by the abolition of the forty-shilling freehold; no great blow to liberty, since the only question was whether the forty-shilling freeholder should be the tool of the landlord or of the priest. The refusal to O’Connell of the rank of king’s counsel, to which he had become eligible, was defended as another sop to the Tories; but it really was a mark of resentment, very unwise as well as undignified, though partly excused by the offensiveness of O’Connell’s bearing and language. It may have been unwillingness to confess change of opinion that led Wellington and Peel to ascribe the concession of Catholic emancipation to fear of civil war. O’Connell could not have put into the field any force capable of making head against the forces of the government, Ulster, the Orangemen, and the Irish gentry. He was himself utterly unwarlike, and there was no foreign power to come to his aid. The measure was a concession of right demanded not only by the Irish Catholics themselves, but by a large party in England which included the best intelligence of the country and the most powerful organs of the press, without the help of which it could not have been carried. Unhappily it was made to appear as a concession of fear.

O’Connell’s victory made him the idol and the master of Catholic Ireland. A large revenue, called his “rent,” was thenceforth raised for him by annual subscription. On this his enemies did not fail to reflect. He defended it as the necessary compensation for the sacrifice of a large professional income to the service of the country. At his ancestral mansion of Darrynane, on the wild, thoroughly Celtic, and Erse-speaking coast of Kerry, the “Liberator” held a rustic court profusely hospitable, amidst a circle of devoted adherents, with an open table at which as many as thirty guests were sometimes seated; thus presenting probably the nearest possible counterpart of the head of a great sept in the tribal days. To Darrynane a pilgrimage was made by Montalembert, who fondly hoped that he had found in its master that union of devotion to the Church with liberty which was the ideal of the liberal Catholic school.

Would Catholic emancipation pacify Ireland? Its authors expected that it would. Even Macaulay appears to think that if the popular religion of Ireland had been treated at the union as the popular religion of Scotland was treated, all in Ireland, as in Scotland, might have been well. The result was disappointing. The Irish cotter had voted and shouted for Catholic emancipation at the bidding of the priests and the platform; but what he wanted and hoped to get by a revolution of any kind was, not so much political or religious change, as more oats and potatoes. His real grievances were hunger and nakedness. To afford those myriads a treacherous food, the behest of nature had been too much disregarded; lands destined for pasture had been turned into potato and oat plots. The millions, reduced to an animal existence, had gone on multiplying with animal recklessness. The increase was greater since rebellion and devastation were at an end. In this sense alone the consequences of the union may be said to have been evil. The priest enjoined marriage on moral grounds, perhaps not without an eye to fees. Between 1801 and 1841 population increased by three millions. More than ever, the homes were filthy hovels shared with swine, the beds litters of dirty straw, the dresses rags, the food the potato, while there was frequent dearth and sometimes famine. Eviction increased, since, the forty-shilling freehold franchise having been abolished, the landlord cared no longer to multiply holdings for the sake of votes. The land system, with its tiers of middlemen, was as cruel as ever. Tithe, the most odious of all imposts, was still collected in the most odious manner. As a consequence, peasant Ireland was still the scene of a vast agrarian war waged by a starving people against the landlord and the tithe-proctor. Arson, murder, carding and mutilation of middlemen and tithe-proctors were rife. Victims leaping from the windows of their burning houses were caught on pitchforks. The nation was undergoing a baptism of lawlessness and savagery. All the peasants were in the league of crime and screened the assassin. Law was powerless. Prosecution was hopeless. Murder was committed in open day and before a number of witnesses, all of whom, if brought into court, would perjure themselves in the common cause. A deep impression had been made upon Peel by the horrors of the agrarian war. He had been particularly moved by a case showing the transcendent height which social passion had attained. A party of Whiteboys entered a house in which there were the man whom they came to murder, his wife, and their little girl. The man was in a room on the ground floor. His wife and their little girl were in a room above, with a closet, through a hole in the door of which the room could be seen. The woman heard the Whiteboys enter and knew their errand. She put the child into the closet, saying to her, “They are murdering your father below, then they will come up and murder me. Mind you look well at them and swear to them when you see them in court.” The child obeyed. She looked on while her mother was murdered. She swore to the murderers in court, and they were hanged upon her evidence.

The evil had reached such a height that society in Ireland was almost on the point of dissolution. Ordinary coercion acts, of which there had been a series, failed and the Liberal government of Grey was compelled to have recourse to martial law.

The tide of reform, however, which began to flow in 1830, before it ebbed, brought to Ireland, besides her share in reform of the Parliamentary representation, the opening of the municipal councils, which had been universally close and corrupt, and after Catholic emancipation still excluded Catholics. It brought commutation of tithe, a measure of immense value, far too long delayed, which shifted the burden of payment from the shoulders of the cotter to those of the landlord. It brought a poor law, cruelly needed in the midst of multiplying evictions. Furthermore, it brought in 1831-1833 the momentous gift of public education, national and undenominational, in the inauguration of which the Anglican primate, Archbishop Whateley, reconciling his advanced liberalism with his anomalous position, took a leading part. Ireland thus in national education preceded England by many years. Whateley had fellow-workers in liberal Catholics, ecclesiastical as well as lay, but the weight of Roman authority and influence was, as it always has been, and still is, against free education. The State Church of the minority succeeded in repelling attack; but it underwent some internal reform, including the suppression of ten superfluous bishoprics; a sacrilegious act of the state which helped to give birth to sacerdotal reaction at Oxford. After the abolition of the tithe-proctor, the State Church had become less odious to the people. The Castle administration was growing more liberal. Lords-lieutenant tried to be fair in distribution of patronage. A Liberal secretary, a man of mark, Drummond, warned the Irish landlords that property had its duties as well as its rights. Peel, as Irish secretary, had laid the foundation of the Irish constabulary, that noble force of law and order which combines independent intelligence with the discipline of the regular soldier. Drummond rendered a most important service by completing the institution. The Irish constabulary has naturally in the main been composed of Protestants. But the Catholic policeman in Ireland has in a marked way resisted seditious influence and been true to the government and his duty. The Irishman follows his commander. Attempts to seduce Irish soldiers from fidelity to the colours seem to have generally failed.

O’Connell, with his following, helped to carry the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, which, in fact, could not have been carried without their vote. He lent a general though not hearty or unwavering support to the Whig ministry of Grey, which, though it paid him some deference, was too strong to be under his control. But on the passing of a drastic coercion bill directed against political as well as agrarian disturbance, there was an angry rupture, and the Whigs became “base, bloody, and brutal,” like all others who crossed O’Connell’s will. O’Connell was not handsomely treated. His eminence as a lawyer, combined with his influence in Ireland, entitled him to a high place. But his blustering violence, his unmeasured vituperation, his venomous abuse of England, and the changefulness of his moods made him a dangerous ally for any government. Cobden said, “O’Connell always treated me with friendly attention, but I never shook hands with him or faced his smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as for trusting him on any public question where his vanity or passions might interpose, I should have as soon thought of an alliance with an Ashantee chief.”

The Melbourne and Russell ministry was weak and fain to lean on O’Connell with his Irish brigade for support and to allow him a voice in appointments, though it suffered greatly in English eyes by the alliance. O’Connell shouted with joy when that government was snatched from death and restored to a feeble existence by the refusal of the queen to change her bed-chamber women on Peel’s demand. But the advent of Peel to power, with a strong government, filled him with rage and despair. The two men had quarrelled in Ireland, a challenge had passed between them, and Peel was the object of O’Connell’s bitterest hatred. In principle the new government was hostile to O’Connell, and its strength placed it wholly beyond his influence. His power was threatened with extinction. His rent, moreover, since there had been a lull in agitation, was rapidly falling off, and he was in pecuniary distress. The last, some think, was not his least urgent motive for embarking in another agitation. This time it was for a repeal of the union, of which he had before only thrown out fitful hints. He now raised the standard of repeal and issued his mandate to the priesthood to call out the peasantry in that cause. The priesthood joyfully obeyed. Monster meetings were held and were addressed by O’Connell in his most violent strain, with ostensible respect for constitutional methods, but with constant appeals to national hatred and suggestions of military force. The priests consecrated the meetings and the sentiments, celebrating Mass on the grounds. It is surely idle to contend that a priesthood acting thus and having its centre in Rome is only a Christian ministry, not a power of political disturbance. An outbreak appeared to be at hand, when the government took direct issue with the agitator by proclaiming a monster meeting which he had appointed to be held at Clontarf; a scene suggestive of military force as it had been the field of the great Irish victory. O’Connell, who, if he was not pacific, was unwarlike, shrank from the conflict and called off the meeting. The government followed up the blow by indicting the agitator for sedition. There was a monster trial at Dublin, in the course of which, to preserve the Irish character of the scene, the attorney-general challenged the counsel on the other side to a duel. O’Connell was found guilty, but the verdict was afterwards quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, for irregularity in the panel, by the judgment of three Whigs against one Tory and the independent Brougham, though it had been upheld by seven of the nine judges to whom the case was referred. O’Connell was set free. But the spell of his ascendancy had been broken. By shrinking from the appeal to force he had forfeited the respect of the fighting section of his party. The Conservative government was invincibly strong. O’Connell’s health and physical force had broken down. Thus ended the great Liberator’s career. He bequeathed his body to Ireland and his heart to Rome. There can be no question about his devotion to either, whatever motives may have mingled with his devotion to Ireland. Whether he did more good to the Irish cause by his patriotism than harm by the passions which he excited and the enmities he created, is a question about which different opinions have been formed. His blind attachment to the Church, had he been victorious, would have put Ireland under the control of a reactionary priesthood.

For some time before his death, O’Connell, by shrinking from force, had been losing the hearts and the adherence of a party of force on his own side called “Young Ireland,” a set of young men, some highly gifted as journalists or poets, whose aim was not repeal but national independence, and who in their organ, The Nation, preached rebellion and revelled in the memory of ’98.

Peel, victorious, graced his victory by concession, to which indeed he was heartily inclined. He saw that “Ireland was his difficulty,” and wanted to treat the problem as liberally as his following of Protestants and squires would let him. He increased the grant to Maynooth, thereby constraining Gladstone, by way of satisfaction to his former self, to go through the form of resignation. He enabled the Catholic Church freely to receive charitable bequests. Not venturing to throw open the fellowships and scholarships of Trinity College to the Catholics, he founded for their special benefit three undenominational colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway, forming together a university with power of granting degrees. This measure, excellent in its way, was but a partial success. The priesthood looked with invincible suspicion on free science, while Catholic professors of science, whom the Church might have trusted, were hardly to be found. But Peel touched the real root of the evil, and pointed to effective reform, when, in 1843, he issued a Commission of Inquiry into land occupancy in Ireland and the condition of the peasant occupants. The commission reported that the agricultural labourer of Ireland continued to suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he was still dependent upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he was still badly housed, badly clothed, and badly fed; and that he was undergoing sufferings greater than those of the people of any other country in Europe. Some tentative motions followed, but there had scarcely been time for the report of the commission to work, when the sentence of nature was pronounced with awful distinctness in the form of a great famine with pestilence in its train. The population of Ireland at this time was probably double that which the island could happily bear. A precarious subsistence was afforded by the potato, which, always treacherous, now suddenly and completely failed. Peel, warned of impending calamity, at once opened the ports for the importation of grain, then grasped the occasion for the repeal of the Corn Laws, on the policy of which his own mind had been undergoing change. His administrative power and that of his colleagues would probably have done all that was possible to meet and mitigate the disaster. But at the critical moment his government was struck down by a conspiracy of Russell and the Whigs with the ire of the Corn Law squires and the vengeful ambition of Disraeli. Russell, who took his place, was far more an adept in party strategy than a master of practical administration. There ensued a heartrending scene, the climax of seven centuries of evil accident, maladministration, and Irish woe.

“Famine advances on us with giant strides,” wrote an official in the August of 1846. “Towards the end of August,” says Mr. T. P. O’Connor, “the calamity began to be universal and its symptoms to be seen. Some of the people rushed into the towns, others wandered along the highroads in the vague hope of food. They plucked turnips from the fields, were glad to live for weeks on a single meal of cabbage a day, feasted on the dead bodies of horses and asses and dogs. There was a story of a mother eating the limbs of her dead child. Dead bodies were discovered with grass in their mouths and in their bowels; weeds were sought after with desperate eagerness; seaweed was greedily devoured; so were diseased cattle and diseased potatoes. Despair fell on all hearts and faces. The ties of kindred in some cases failed, parents neglecting their children and children turning out their aged parents. On the other hand, there were stories of parents dying of starvation to save a small store for their children. The workhouses, usually shunned, were overcrowded. In one, three thousand persons sought relief in a single day. They crowded even into the jails. Driven from the workhouses, people began to die by the roadside or alone in their despair within their cabins. Roads and streets were strewn with corpses. One inspector buried one hundred and forty bodies found on the highway. The scenes inside the cabins were even more horrible; husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their wives and children. The decencies of burial were no longer observed. Then came the plague, attacking bodies already weakened by hunger.” “A terrible apathy,” says an eye-witness, “hangs over the poor of Skibbereen; starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy; despair has made them hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering; the same rag covers festering remains of mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are unconscious of the horrible contiguity; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the living to scare them from their horrid banquet; fathers bury their children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves, round which no weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped; one scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the arms of death.”[3]

All the devices of government by relief work and in other ways to grapple with the twofold calamity were palliatives and little more. The most effective measure of relief was a vast emigration to the United States and Canada, which also had its horrors. Thousands, already weakened by hunger and suffering, succumbed to the hardships of the passage; another multitude died on landing. Canada did all she could for the hapless strangers cast upon her shore. But ship-fever followed the fugitives, and graveyards were filled with their dead. It was reckoned that more than two hundred thousand persons died on the voyage or on arrival at their destination. Few Irishmen, however prejudiced against England, will deny that the people of Great Britain and Canada showed unbounded sympathy with Ireland in her affliction, and did their utmost for her relief. O’Connell himself, while he criticised the measures of the government, allowed that individual humanity and charity were abundant; that the noblest generosity was evinced by multitudes of the English; and that if individual generosity could save a nation, British generosity would do it. He said that he was afraid of not finding words sufficient to express his strong and lively sense of English humanity. To charges of English indifference to Irish suffering, his words are a sufficient answer.

Close upon the famine and pestilence came 1848, the year of European revolution. Young Ireland, the party of force, did not fail to catch the flame. Its organ, The Nation, cried, “It is a death struggle now between the murderer and his victim. Strike! Rise, men of Ireland, since Providence so wills it! Rise in your cities and in your fields, on your hills, in your valleys, by your dark mountain passes, by your rivers and lakes and ocean-washed shores! Rise as a nation!” The Irish Felon, a journal still more advanced, was even more openly for war. But neither in city or field, on mountain or in valley, by pass or shore, did the people rise at the impassioned call. Young Ireland found at once that it was but a knot of literary men whose appeals to national feeling, penned as they were with vigour, might be read with sentimental pleasure but would rouse nobody to arms. O’Connell’s mastery of the people depended on the support of the priesthood, given in a cause originally religious to that zealous champion of the Church who, dying, bequeathed his heart to Rome. Young Ireland was more revolutionary than Catholic, as the priests did not fail to perceive. The desire of political revolution, apart from agrarianism, was not strong enough to rouse the peasantry to arms, though they had learned to hate England as the supposed source of their sufferings. The people, moreover, had hardly recovered from the depression caused by the famine. Young Ireland however raised its flag. Smith O’Brien, with a small party, made a trial trip, appealing to the people of two or three places, but met with no response. A farcical encounter with the police at the house of widow Cormack on the bog of Boulagh, followed by the capture of Smith O’Brien, was the end. The sentence of death passed on the leader of the revolt was wisely commuted by the government.

The famine had at least one good effect. It drew attention to the main source of the evil in Ireland, which was agrarian and social, not political and religious. But now it was supposed that the mischief lay in the inability of the landlords, overwhelmed with debt, burdened with family settlements, and crushed by the demands of the Poor Law, to perform their duty to their tenants. To remedy this evil was created the Encumbered Estates Court, with power to order the sale of encumbered property on the petition of the creditors and give a clear title to the purchaser. The policy seemed sound, yet the result was not good. The court cleared out the old proprietors who lacked means to do their duty; it put in their place a new class of proprietors who, having been induced to buy the land on pure speculation, felt that they had no duty to do, and who, unlike their predecessors, had no kindly tie to the people. The new owners naturally proceeded to make the most of their purchase; and the way to make the most of their purchase clearly was to sweep out the cotter tenants and throw the land into large holdings. This some of them proceeded to do, and the consequence was a period of evictions almost vying in cruelty with the famine. Whole districts were cleared and relet in large holdings. Cabins were being thrown down in all directions. A thousand of them were levelled in one union within a few months, and the inmates were cast out helpless, half-naked, starving, to go to the union or perish. The cabins were burned that the people might not return to them. The suffering and misery, says a reporter, attendant upon these wholesale evictions, is indescribable. The number of houseless paupers in one union is beyond his calculation. Those evicted crowd neighbouring cabins and villages, and disease is necessarily generated. In April he calculates that six thousand houses have been levelled since November, and he expects five hundred more by July. Wretched hovels had been pulled down, the inmates of which in a helpless state of fever and nakedness were left by the roadside for days. While inspecting a stone-breaking depot, the reporter observes one of the men take off his remnant of a pair of shoes and start across the fields. He follows him with his eye, and at a distance sees the blaze of a fire in the bog. He sends to inquire the cause of it and of the man’s running from his work, and is told that the man’s house had been levelled the day before, that he had erected a temporary hut, and that while his wife and children were gathering shell-fish on the beach and he was stone-breaking the bailiff fired it. This incident was one of several which made a deep impression on Peel, who would probably have moved with effect had he remained in power. Pages are filled with pictures of this kind. Civilized Europe could show nothing like it. It was almost enough to break forever the spirit of the nation, certainly to implant the bitterest memories, and here the main cause was misgovernment and bad law.

Relief works were no cure, nor were they in themselves very rational, since the people, unfed, half-clothed, and living in pestilential mud-holes, were really too weak to work. Parliament so far interfered as to pass an act requiring forty-eight hours’ notice of eviction to the relieving officers, prohibiting evictions two hours before sunset or sunrise, and on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and prohibiting the demolition of the house of a tenant about to be evicted. But this rather throws a lurid light on the state of things than effects a cure. The public even might have some reason to complain of the land-owner who recklessly cast upon the poor rates or upon public charity the human encumbrances of his land.

Apart from overpopulation and its effects, the Irish land-law unquestionably needed reform. The people, struggling with each other for their sole means of subsistence, undertook to pay exorbitant rents, and their improvements, if they made any, became without compensation the property of the landlord. In Ulster, always exceptional, there prevailed a certain measure of tenant-right, something like the English copyhold. In Ireland the demand for tenant-right now began to be loudly heard. An English Radical, Sharman Crawford, brought forward a measure in Parliament, but without effect. For some years nothing effectual was done in the way of reform. Palmerston, to whom power passed, though in foreign policy he dallied with revolution, was conservative, especially on social subjects, at home. “Tenant’s right is landlord’s wrong” was his judgment on the agrarian question. On the Irish side there was no leader of worth or force. Patriotism was in a trance, and the chronicler of the Nationalist party indignantly proclaims that the cause was betrayed by a series of low adventurers who embraced it as the way to preferment. “The most common type of Irish politician,” he says in his anguish, “in these days was the man who entered Parliamentary life solely for the purpose of selling himself for place and salary.” “This,” he adds, “was the golden season, when every Irishman who could scrape as much money together as would pay his election expenses was able after a while to obtain a governorship or some other of the many substantial rewards which English party leaders were able to give to their followers.” The constituencies, it seems, political feeling being at a low ebb, were ready to elect the man who could bring them public pelf. Of the adventurers, the worst was Sadleir, who, with his set, attempted to intrigue with the Peelites, and who, being a financial swindler as well as a political schemer, became bankrupt and committed suicide. So the cause of the Three F’s—Fixity of tenure, Free sale, and Fair rents—made no way. English Radicals in Parliament stood all the time ready to move with the Irish on this question or for Disestablishment; but the Irish members were taken up with intriguing for places for themselves, for appointments of the sons of their constituents to clerkships in Somerset House, or for a government subsidy to the Galway Packet contract. Irish writers are bound to remember that Englishmen were not responsible for the choice or character of Irish members. They are bound also to remember the impression which the members chosen by the Irish could not fail to make on English minds. The British Parliament could not justly be said to be “deaf, blind, and insolently ignorant,” though it was not on the right track. It might be excused for being a little deaf and blind to the appeals of “a motley gang of as disreputable and needy adventurers as ever trafficked in the blood and tears of a nation.”

From the time of the union to this time there had been, and long after this time continued to be, a series of coercion acts, rendered necessary by agrarian outrage. There were thirty-two enactments of this kind between the union and 1844. It would have been almost better, had it been possible, frankly to suspend the constitution while the true remedy was being applied.

Liberal leadership now devolved from Palmerston on Gladstone, thus bringing on the political field a new and immensely powerful motive power. Gladstone was in opposition. In his mind a natural, and under the party system legitimate, desire of recovering power for his party and himself perhaps mingled with a sincere though tardily formed conviction of the injustice of such an institution as the State Church of a small minority in Ireland. It was unfortunate that he, like Peel and Wellington, gave fear of Irish violence as a motive for doing justice. After some premonitory hints, he, in former days the great champion of state religion, declared for disestablishment. His case was overwhelmingly strong. Faint and feeble were the arguments on the other side. The institution was an anachronism, an anomaly, and a scandal. Its past had been miserable. It had made no converts; it had made many rebels. By its tests and its intolerance it had divided the Protestant interest, sending many a Presbyterian across the sea to fight for the American Revolution. Its ministry had been jobbed, its character defiled, by unscrupulous politicians. Of late, however, it had been greatly reforming itself, and it had got rid of its tithe-proctors by the commutation of tithes. Its clergy generally were now on friendly terms with the people. Its last hour was by far its best. Vested interests were respected in the change, and the unblest establishment glided quietly and safely into its new and happier life as a purely spiritual church. Through the Commons the measure passed with ease; through the Lords, like other great measures of change, it was forced by fear.

XIV

Economically, the tendency, indeed the aim, of the land acts has been to make Ireland a land of peasant proprietors. The social tendency of such legislation is to the abolition of the gentry, of the value of whose leadership to a people eminently in need of leaders, Gladstone, personally ignorant of Ireland, might not be a competent judge. Unquestionably, the relations between landlord and tenant called for reform. The appropriation of the tenant’s improvements by the landlord was in itself plainly unjust, and the sweeping evictions yielded in cruelty only to the famine. But for overpopulation the immediate remedy was depletion. Had Gladstone said that the overpopulation was originally the consequence of misgovernment and repression of industry which, reducing the people to abject misery, had wrecked their self-respect and self-restraint, he would have been emphatically right, and the fact cannot be too constantly kept in mind. Gladstone might also have said with truth that emigration was a mournful cure, though it transferred the emigrant to a far happier land and lot. But the overpopulation having taken place, whatever the cause, the only remedy was depletion. No expansion of manufacturing industry, commerce, or mining adequate to the absorption of the surplus population could be expected in time to meet the pressing call for relief. Irishmen are sensitive on this point, but no disparagement of the Irish race is implied in the recognition of the facts. Overpopulation was not the fault of the people, but their misfortune. There has been a very large migration of the Irish into England and Scotland as well as into the colonies and the United States.

Gladstone’s measure, however, fell short of Irish expectation, which was the three F’s: Fixity of tenure; Fair rent; Freedom of sale. A land war presently broke out and became combined with a struggle nominally for Home Rule, really for separation from Great Britain. The political part of this agitation, rebellion as it really was, had its main source and support, not in Ireland, but in the Irish population of the United States. Even before the famine there had been an emigration of Irish to America, so large as by its political effects to alarm American patriotism and give birth to the great Know-nothing Movement in defence of American nationality. The Irish, being highly gregarious and unused to large farming, settled in cities. When they went out to work on railways or canals, it was in large gangs. They were drawn into the vortex of politics and became the retainers of crafty politicians, who, in secret, smiled at their simplicity. They fell almost invariably into the Democratic party. The name may have attracted them; but the Democratic party was that of the Southern slave-owner, who was glad to enlist the Irishman as his humble ally at the North and to pay him out of the treasury of political corruption. The rank and file of Tammany were largely Irish. O’Connell had been nobly hostile to slavery. His kinsmen and admirers on the other side of the Atlantic were, on the contrary, vehement supporters of slavery, and jealous assertors of their superiority over the enslaved race. Such is the tendency of the newly enfranchised. In the war between the North and the South the Irish in New York rose against the draft and committed great outrages, especially against the negro, among other things setting fire to a negro orphan asylum. They were ruthlessly put down. After the famine, emigration greatly increased. Family affection among the Irish is beautifully strong, and the members of a family who had gone before sent home their earnings to pay for the passage of those whom they had left behind. It has been reckoned that the Irish have expended twenty millions sterling in this way. With a passionate love of Ireland the American Irish combined a still more passionate hatred of England as Ireland’s tyrant and oppressor. Invasion and destruction of England were their dream. Always addicted to secret fraternities and natural adepts in conspiracy, they formed associations for war on England; that of the Fenians and that of the still more rabid and bloodthirsty Clan-na-Gael, whose utterances were frenzies of hatred. Large sums were subscribed; Irish servant-girls, with a patriotism which in any case was honourable to them, giving freely of their wages. American politicians flattered the mania, and harvested the Irish vote. The war bequeathed to the Fenians some regular soldiers, among others, Mitchel, who had been conspicuous in the ranks of slavery. The Fenians invaded Canada and overthrew a corps of Canadian volunteers, but retired on the approach of regulars; a bad omen for their conquest of England. Conquest of England the Fenians did not attempt, beyond a farcical essay at Chester. But they helped greatly to kindle rebellion in Ireland, to provide it with money, and to supply it with assassins. The National League, the form which, in Ireland, political combined with agrarian rebellion assumed, almost ousted the law and the queen’s government. It resisted the payment of rents. Those who opposed its will were “boycotted,” a term of which this is the origin. Sometimes they were murdered. A stripling was murdered for having served a master who had come under the ban of the League. A wife was mobbed on her way home from viewing the body of her murdered husband. Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Irish secretary, going to Ireland with the kindest intentions, and the permanent secretary, Mr. Burke, were stabbed to death in the Phœnix Park. Mr. W. E. Forster, distinguished by his humane efforts at the time of the famine, was marked for assassination. At the outbreak of the rebellion a policeman escorting Fenian prisoners had been murdered at Manchester, and an attempt made to blow up Clerkenwell Prison, where a Fenian was confined, had caused the deaths of twelve people and the maiming of one hundred and twenty. Gladstone had made the mistake of treating the alarm caused by those outrages as a motive for doing justice to Ireland. The motive for doing justice to Ireland was justice.

The assassination of Cavendish and Burke, it is right to say, was the act, not of the Land League or of any conspiracy in Ireland itself, but of the Invincibles, a club of frenzied Irish in the United States. By the Irish leaders it was heartily condemned. That it was regarded with utter abhorrence in the Irish quarters of English cities was denied by observers at the time. Fierce and blind were the passions of those days.

To repress what was in fact a rebellion fed by foreign aid, to uphold the law, and rescue life and industry in Ireland from the lawless tyranny of the National League, as it was called, the government, as was its plain duty, sought and obtained extraordinary powers, and threw a number of the leaders of the rebellion into prison. It was time, when loyal citizens were joining the League for protection in their callings, which the queen’s government could no longer afford. When the Irish rose against the draft in New York, the Americans shot down several hundreds of them without process of law.

In the British Parliament the “rebel” party, as Bright justly called it, had found a leader of mark in Parnell, a man of great ability and force of character, incisive and forcible, if not eloquent, as a speaker. He had supplanted in the leadership Mr. Butt, a man of social sensibility and refinement, unfitted for an aggressive part. The agitation under Parnell combined agrarianism with repeal, thus giving the political part of the movement a hold upon the people and a force and a formidable extension in Ireland which by itself it had never had. The Land League, becoming the National League, almost supplanted the queen’s government in Ireland.

Parnell’s avowed aim was the foundation of a peasant proprietorship. Neither he nor any of his party seem to have cared to study dispassionately the natural aptitudes of the country, and to satisfy themselves whether it was capable of supporting the population which disastrous events and sinister influences had accumulated upon it. Their main object was political. It was, under the guise of repealing the union, to sever Ireland from Great Britain. As an inducement to the peasantry to support them in that attempt, they offered to transfer the property in the land from the landlord to the tenant, though with a decorous promise of indemnity. Mr. Parnell’s name was English, and he had been educated at Cambridge. It was understood that his bearing towards his Celtic associates was high and that he was peremptory as well as absolute in command. At his side was Mr. Biggar, whose great gift was unparalleled effrontery. The two undertook to coerce the British Parliament by obstruction. Had the British Parliament been itself, it would quickly have asserted its dignity. But it was split into factions, upon the balance of which Parnell and Biggar were able to play. Gladstone succumbed so far as by an equivocal agreement, nicknamed the Kilmainham Treaty, to release Parnell and his associates from prison. On the other hand, the Conservatives coming into power struck the flag of the law by refusing to renew the Crimes Act for the protection of loyalty in Ireland, while they angled for the Parnellite vote by casting reproach on the conduct of a lord-lieutenant who had done his duty.

At the general election which followed, Gladstone went to the country, appealing for a majority which should enable him to settle the Irish question independently of Parnell. Parnell passed the word to all his partisans, both in Ireland and in the Irish quarters of English towns, to vote against the Liberals. They obeyed. Gladstone was defeated. Then he who had denounced Parnell as wading through rapine to dismemberment; who had proclaimed his arrest as a rebel to an applauding multitude at Guildhall; who had thrown him and scores of his followers into prison; who had never given to the nation a hint of his sympathy with Parnell’s agitation, suddenly turned round and coalesced with Parnell. He put forth an apology for his conversion founded on the hidden workings of his own mind. But what availed the workings of his own mind if all the time he was carrying on the policy of repression, misleading the nation thereby? It is true he might have pointed to the coquetting of the other party, or its leaders, with the Parnellites. He might perhaps with more force have appealed to his own unquestionably sincere sympathy with all who were struggling for independence. His retrospective imagination was strong, and having changed so much he had always present to his mind the possibility of further change. It made his language sometimes capable of unforeseen interpretation.

The Liberal party was filled with astonishment, confusion, and dismay. But the Times stood fast and rallied the adherents of the union. To the steadfastness and power of this great journal the defeat of Gladstone’s policy and the salvation of the union were largely due. Bright’s refusal to cast in his lot with the “rebel” party was also a heavy blow to Gladstone. The political connection between the two men had been growing close, and Bright might almost be said to personify justice to Ireland, as to all the weak and oppressed. If there was a man who would have protested against the sacrifice of Ireland to English interests it was John Bright. Lord Hartington presented himself with unexpected vigour as a Unionist leader. Gladstone was defeated in the House of Commons and still more signally in the general election which followed, Conservative and Unionist Liberals voting together on the special issue. In the contest Gladstone lashed himself into fury, appealed to Separatist sentiment, not in Ireland only, but in Scotland and Wales, to the prejudice of the masses against the classes, of the uneducated against the educated and the learned professions. He was fired with enthusiasm for the right. His instincts were always high. But this did not make him a cool-headed statesman warily dealing with a question which touched the life of the commonwealth.

Now fortune played a strange trick. Parnell, the leader and mainstay of the League, Gladstone’s ally, was convicted of adultery. Adultery is not political, but it was too much both for the Irish hierarchy and for the nonconformist conscience. Parnell had to be dragged from the helm of the Irish party, to which he clung with a frantic tenacity, such as proved him after all to be, though a very remarkable, hardly a very great, man.

Raised once more by another turn of fortune’s wheel in the party game to power, Gladstone again brought forward a Home Rule Bill. This time he, with the help of the Irish members, pushed the bill through the House, partly by closure, in a form already condemned by himself, giving Ireland a separate Parliament for her own affairs, and at the same time retaining her representation in the British Parliament, with power there to vote upon all questions. The Irish delegation would have played, as in fact it does now, for its own purposes, on the balance of British parties, and baffled any attempt to enforce restrictions on the doings of its own Parliament which the Home Rule Act might have imposed. The majority for the bill in the Commons was forty-three, including eighty Irish members. British members of the House of Commons who voted for the bill probably reckoned on its being killed in the Lords. Killed it was there with a vengeance. Gladstone appealed to the people against the Lords, but in vain. Thus ended in disaster his wonderful career. His speeches on Home Rule showed, like all his speeches, vast oratoric power, mastery of details, clearness and liveliness in exposition. But weak points are also apparent. The Irish Parliament cannot have been at once a sink of corruption and an institution with which it was sacrilege to interfere. The comparison of the union in criminality to the massacre of St. Bartholomew must surely have made all hearers but the Irish smile. Upon this subject the speaker raves, and generally he forgets that the mission of reconciliation which he had undertaken would not be furthered by opening old sores. The examples of Austria-Hungary and the connection of Norway with Sweden, cited by him as proofs that a conjunction of two Parliaments worked well, would be generally taken not as encouragements but as warnings. The case of Norway and Sweden has since become a warning indeed. The intricate machinery by which the speaker proposes to regulate the action of his two Parliaments has too much the look of a speculative structure elaborated without reference to the peculiar state of Ireland and the forces to be encountered there. Of the force of the Catholic priesthood, nothing is said. In fact, the political architect knew little of the country with which he was dealing, having been in it only for three weeks, and then not at a good point of view.

Thus the Irish question, which the greatest among the public men of his time had failed to settle, was once more thrown into the cauldron of party strife.

XV

Looking back on these most melancholy annals, we shall find that for their general sadness Nature is as much to be blamed as man. She did well in placing at the side of a country rich in coal and minerals, destined to be manufacturing, one of pasture to supply food. She made a fatal mistake in peopling them with different and uncongenial races. War, in the age of war, and conquest of the weaker by the stronger were sure to be the result. For the form in which conquest came, the Papacy has partly to answer. It used the sword of the Norman adventurer in this case, as it had in the case of England, to crush religious independence and force all churches to bow to its own dominion, while, as the wails of its own partisans in the Becket controversy show, it was itself unworthy of the sovereignty of Christendom. Of this Catholics are bound to take note, as they are of the fact that the Papacy at a later day, by inciting the Irish to rebellion on its own account, brought upon them no small portion of their woes. The Norman conquest of England had incidentally the bad effect of connecting the English monarchy with dominion in France, and thus turning the forces of the English kings from Ireland, where they might have ended the agony, to a field where they were much worse than wasted. Things could not have taken a more unfortunate course than that of a colony of half-civilized conquerors carrying on war with barbarous tribes of a different race and tongue, yet without force to effect the conquest. The invasion of Edward Bruce, with which England had nothing to do, probably did further harm by breaking up whatever there was of Anglo-Norman order and turning barons into chiefs of Irish Septs. Then the Reformation, a European convulsion involving Ireland, and in the most unfortunate way, since it identified Protestantism with conquest, Catholicism with the struggle for independence, introduced another deadly source of strife, and made Ireland the point of danger to England in her desperate struggle for her own existence and the salvation of the Protestant cause. Otherwise it seems not impossible that the Tudor statesmen, with such a man as Burleigh at their head, might, as they desired, have effected a peaceful settlement. Civilization, not extermination, was their aim. The great Celtic rebellions of Shane O’Neil, Desmond, and Tyrone, the last two Catholic as well as Celtic, forced upon them the policy of extermination with all its horrors. The rising and massacre of 1641 were the sequel. The vengeance of the victor and the transplantation of the vanquished to Connaught were in their turn the sequel of the rising and massacre of 1641. Of these again the rebound was the Catholic rising of 1688, which, had it been successful, would have ended certainly in the dispossession, probably in the expulsion, possibly in the extermination, of the Protestants. English liberty and religion were at the same time threatened by an Irish Catholic force encamped at Hounslow. The Penal law was execrable; yet hardly more execrable than the Great Act of Attainder. In later days Castle government by corruption was vile; but it was the inevitable accompaniment of the constitution of 1782, the work of Grattan and the Volunteers. Of the master evil of all, the state of the masses of the Irish people, English protectionism must share the blame with the penal laws. But protectionism was then the delusion of the commercial world. Irish patriots were not free from it. To deal with peasant distress was the immediate duty of the Irish Parliament, which refused even to turn its eyes that way. Peasant distress, organized for rebellion by a revolutionary party at Belfast, itself deriving its inspiration from the American and French revolutions, produced the rising, ever to be accursed and deplored, of 1798.

Irish patriots are apt to talk of England as a single person or, rather, fiend, actuated in her dealings with Ireland by hatred and contempt. England is a nation divided into parties and swayed by varying influences from time to time. The England of Peel and Gladstone is not the England of the Georges, the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, or responsible for the doings of those dynasties. In the evil days of her political history, England, if she oppressed Ireland, also suffered herself. The Liberal party in England did its best for Ireland, and if the Irish members had been what they ought to have been and done what they ought to have done, more rapid progress might have been made. As it was, Ireland shared the great measures of Parliamentary and municipal reform which there had been little prospect of her achieving by herself. She received the boon of national and undenominational education about a generation before England, and but for the reactionary influence of her own priesthood would have received it in full measure. The same influence maimed as far as it could the undenominational colleges. Nothing could be more deplorable than the long series of coercion acts. But it was hardly to be expected that the English government should strike its flag to assassination and boycotting, or that the British nation would be moved to concession by the inroads of American conspirators combined with domestic rebellion. It was about 1866 that Guizot, talking of Ireland as he walked with an English guest, stopped in his walk and said with an emphatic gesture, “The conduct of England to Ireland for the last thirty years has been admirable.” This, before disestablishment, was too strong, as the English guest remarked at the time; but as the judgment of a cool-headed foreign statesman, whose course had not been one of unbroken harmony with England, it was likely to be more just at least to the motives of England than the invectives of O’Connell.

Since the Union there has been no 1641, no 1688, no 1798. The two races and religions have lived generally at peace if not in concord with each other. The religious riots at Belfast are a very mitigated relic of the religious wars of former days. Reform, though its advance has been slow and fitful, has advanced. Within a generation from the date of the Union, Catholic Emancipation was carried. The tithe-proctor did not very long survive. Presently the State Church itself was abolished. Ireland shared with Great Britain Parliamentary reform, to which the Irish oligarchy could never have consented without political and social convulsion. Not long afterwards came national education, bestowed on Ireland before it was bestowed on England. None of these improvements would directly touch the agrarian sore, the malignity of which was increased by the growth of the Irish population under the reign of order, far beyond the power of the land to maintain it. But relief has been given to famine, and strenuous efforts have been made and are still being made to effect a radical cure. Ireland has enjoyed free trade with Great Britain and with the whole British Empire. Everything has been open to Irish merit and industry. Millions of Irish and their children have found homes in Britain and the colonies. To sever Ireland from Great Britain is still possible. To divide the Irish from the British is not possible. In both islands and in all the colonies the two races are now joined and cannot be put asunder.

Besides, as has already been said, we must always bear it in mind that we do not see the other side of Destiny’s cards. Suppose Ireland had remained the land of the Septs, would her lot certainly have been more happy? Neither at the time of the Norman Conquest nor afterwards do the Septs appear to have shown any tendency to a union such as would have given birth to a national polity and its attendant civilization. For aught we can see, they might have gone on indefinitely, like the clans of the Scottish Highlands, in a state of barbarous strife fatal to progress of every kind. Even their common interest in the struggle against the Anglo-Norman invader produced no general or permanent union. The Brehon law, which was their principal bond, had no executive force and was in itself barbarous, not distinguishing public from private wrong. The Septs warred upon each other not less savagely than the conqueror warred upon them all. If anything like union came at last, it was not political but religious, and brought with it a fatal share in the European war of religions. Nor were conquests other than Anglo-Norman impossible. From the Highlands and islands of Scotland came bodies of marauding adventurers which might have been reënforced, and, in the North at least, have prevailed. It is not certain that without the aid of John de Bermingham and his Anglo-Normans, the Septs would have got rid of Edward Bruce.

That the interest of Ireland should be regarded as subordinate to that of Great Britain was the principle on which British politicians acted in the days that are past. To the past this principle must now be and indeed has been decisively consigned. That union, to be good for either party, must be good for both, is the accepted basis of discussion. On the other hand, it is not to be assumed that the aspirations of Irish politicians naturally bent on carving out an independent field of action for themselves, are entirely free from the bias of personal ambition or identical with a dispassionate view of the interest of the Irish people. Nor is it to be forgotten that Ulster is a part of Ireland.

There are two questions, perfectly distinct and calling for separate consideration, though they have become blended in the course and for the purposes of the political agitation. One is economical, the other political.

The economical question is whether Ireland can support her present population. Patriotic eloquence will not change her skies, or render it otherwise than cruel to induce her people to stay in a land in which they cannot make their bread. Instances there may be of barren soil made by the loving industry of the small owner fruitful and capable of supporting a large population; but the industry of the small owner, though it can improve the soil, cannot alter the skies. What is to be desired is a special report, calm and expert, upon this subject. Is Ireland generally capable of being turned with advantage into an arable country? Can wheat or grain of any kind be profitably raised there in face of the competition of the great grain-growing countries such as that now opened, and bidding fair to be opened over a much larger area, in the Canadian Northwest? The small farmer to live must have something to sell. Is there reason to look in any other direction than farming for a speedy extension of Irish industries such as would provide bread sufficient for the population? Is the water-power of Ireland, now that electricity has been developed, likely to do what has been done for England by coal? Is the shipping trade, for which the Irishman has had little opportunity of showing a turn, likely to increase? These are questions which it is for economists, not for politicians or patriotic orators, to decide. It is said that there are tracts of land in Ireland still unoccupied and fit for occupation. If there are, the survey will show the fact. Land purchase by government subvention is a policy hardly to be pursued unless it is certain that its results will not presently be reversed by nature.

The worst part of emigration is that it carries away the pith and sinews of a nation, taking the strong and leaving the weak, the aged, and unsupported women. It is a pleasant proof, already noticed, of the warmth of the Irish heart that there has been less of solitary and more of family emigration in their case than in those of some other emigrating races. After all, how has the earth been peopled, how have all the nations been formed but by migration?

To turn to the political question. The danger of insurrection has probably passed away. Fenianism has been largely deprived of its trans-Atlantic base, and can no longer look confidently to American sympathy for support and supplies. The Irish vote has less power. Little at least was heard of it in the last presidential election. Yet the political question is still most serious, and presses urgently for settlement; a state of things largely due to the division of parties in the British government which showed its influence in the abandonment of the Crimes Act by the Salisbury administration; in the Maamtrasna debate; and in Mr. Gladstone’s sudden coalition with Parnell; but above all in the votes of British members of the House of Commons for Mr. Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill, giving Ireland a Parliament of her own and representation in the British Parliament at the same time. Parliament still has in it a body of Irish members not only alien but hostile, avowing that their object is not to aid in deliberation but to coerce, playing upon the balance of parties for purposes of their own, degrading the assembly, and distracting the councils of the nation. Nor is the source of this evil confined to the constituencies of Ireland. There is in England and Scotland a large Irish population, which, as was seen in the election of 1885, obeys the voice of the Irish leaders and at their command votes inimically to the country in which it lives and earns its bread. In Ireland itself, moreover, the hell-broth of agitation is kept constantly seething to the inevitable detriment of recuperative effort, which cannot do its full work without security for the future.

As the first step it should be calmly settled what are the specific grievances under which Ireland labours, and which the Imperial legislature cannot, but an Irish Parliament could, remove. Historic wrongs are past remedy. Ireland has more than her share of representation in Parliament. She has no established Church. If her priesthood would let her, she would have a complete system of national education. Her land law is now far more favourable to the tenant than that of the other kingdoms, and she has been and still is receiving government subventions in aid of the tillers of her soil which English and Scotch tenants do not receive and which would cease if she became independent. Nothing is closed against her people. They have the markets of the whole Empire. All its offices, patronage, and services are perfectly open to them. So long as they will abstain from outrage and murder, they enjoy all the personal privileges of British freemen. It cannot be said that the law has been suspended for any purpose other than the repression of outrage. If the ordinary law and government were very bad, Ulster would hardly have prospered as it has done. If Castle government is the grievance, abolition of it was offered to Ireland long ago and was by her rejected. Let the existing grievances be specified, and let it be seen whether Imperial legislation is incapable of redressing them. The truth is that with the Irish leaders it has not been redress of particular wrongs and grievances or the introduction of practical improvements that has been the object of desire. Their aim has been to create a nationalist feeling which should end in political separation. Such has been the constant tenor of their appeals to sentiment and the end to which their policy has really pointed.

Suppose Ireland severed from Great Britain, what would be her lot? She would then have to assume all the burdens and responsibilities of an independent nation, including military and naval defence, as well as the entire expense of a separate government. As she could not hope to vie in strength with her powerful neighbour, she would be at that neighbour’s mercy; nor, considering the temper in which the parting would take place, would occasions for quarrel be unlikely to arise. Ireland might have to seek the protection and become the vassal of some foreign power. Irish trade would no longer be free of British markets or of the markets of British dependencies. Irish labour would no longer be free of the British labour market. The Indian service and the Imperial services generally would be closed against Irishmen.

Nor would Ireland be entirely united in herself or perfectly set free from the hated British influence. She would still have in her the men of Ulster, Saxon and Protestant, antagonistic probably to the Catholic majority, and if they were pressed in the unequal conflict, stretching out their hands for aid to their fellow-Protestants and kinsmen in Great Britain.

A mere arm of the sea, such as that which divides Ireland from Great Britain, is surely not enough in these days of improved navigation, to form a bar to political union. The distance from London to Dublin is now practically far less than it was a century ago from London to Edinburgh. Nor does there seem any reason why salt water should be fatal. The Ionian Islands are in the kingdom of Greece; so probably some day will be Crete.

If Ireland were detached from Great Britain, into what hands would she fall? The gentry would be extinguished. To excite popular hatred of them as landlords has been the constant aim of the Nationalist leaders. There would be a general repudiation of rent, which the Irish government and judiciary would lack the will, while the British government and judiciary would have lost the power, to prevent. The record of Irish landlordism is not bright. Absenteeism has been a great evil, though the estates of some absentees have been notably well managed. There have been hideously cruel evictions, especially it seems on the lands purchased by speculators under the Encumbered Estates Act. Landlordism, as mere drawing of rent, is an evil. It is not desirable that any man should own land as a non-resident or own more land than he can manage or superintend. The old feudal law attaching service to lordship of land was sound in principle. But if the Irish gentry would accept that principle, be resident, look after their estates, and do their duty to their tenants, they would probably be accepted by their people as social leaders, and they might play that part with good effect. The life of the French peasant is not the acme either of civilization or of happiness, even though we may make some abatement from the picture presented by Zola in “La Terre.” Unhappily the tendency, even in England, seems to be towards the detachment of the owner from his land and the abandonment on his part of every function save that of receiving the rent and spending it, perhaps in some pleasure city or abroad. The decadence of the agricultural interest in England is by some ascribed to this cause.

The gentry being no more, Catholic Ireland would at first fall into the hands of the priesthood. The moral character of the Irish priesthood in the opinion of impartial judges is high, as is that of the priesthood of French Canada. In both cases ecclesiastical influence is strong, and in both a population virtuous after the Catholic model is the result. The two are probably about the best things that the Roman Catholic Church has to show. But the Roman Catholic religion is mediæval. The training of its ministers inevitably shuts out light which would be fatal to mediæval belief. An Irish peasant lad, having been intellectually secluded for seven years at Maynooth, comes out proof against the intellectual influences and advancing science of his time. He is the mental liegeman and the preacher of the Syllabus, which anathematizes freedom of thought and claims for the Church dominion, not only over the soul but over the body, such as was hers in the Middle Ages. He laid his ban on the Queen’s Colleges, and has discouraged and thwarted the extension of popular education. In regard to education and intelligence, he has been in Ireland what he has been in Spain and other countries subject to his sway. In the sphere of industry and commerce the influence has generally been the same. The religious ideal of life with its Church festivals and Saints’ Days has prevailed. In Ireland as in Canada the priest inculcates early marriages, the effects of which may be morally good but are economically perilous. The excessive conversion of the fruits of industry to the unproductive purposes of the Church has already begun to call forth protests.

The power of the Roman Catholic priesthood would be encountered by the stalwart Protestantism of Ulster in the Parliamentary arena as it still is sometimes in the streets of Belfast. It might presently find itself encountered by another adversary, revolutionary Nationalism, the heir of that party of force which broke away from the leadership of O’Connell, the devout son of the Church, and was an object of well-founded suspicion and aversion to the hierarchy of his day. The affinity of this element is to the revolutionary party in other countries; and if, like the United Irishmen of Belfast, it has been willing to act with allies devoted to the Church, it is not itself devout, as the Church, if she comes to share power with it, may be led to feel.

The idea of unity of race as a basis of Irish nationality has little support. In the North there is a strong and masterful Saxon element. There must be a large Anglo-Saxon and English element in the old Pale. The men of Tipperary, though characteristically Irish, are believed to be descendants of Cromwellians. There is Huguenot blood.

The revival of Erse as a national language is surely a patriotic dream. How is it possible to revive a language all but dead, with no valuable literature or wealth of printed books, in face of a language which has a grand literature, is spoken by all the educated classes, indeed almost universally, in Ireland, and is necessary for intercourse with Great Britain. O’Connell, we are told, had no great sympathy with the revival of Irish archæology, and no sympathy at all with the project of reviving the Irish language. He recognized the superior utility of the English tongue as the medium of all modern communication, and saw without regret the gradual disuse of Erse. Fancy and sentiment may prevail among a literary class which nevertheless will hardly carry its patriotism so far as to darken its own mind by unlearning English.

“Ireland ought to be governed in accordance with Irish ideas.” Such is the current saying, and it sounds wise. But statesmanship would hardly act upon it before taking measures to learn what ideas are peculiarly Irish and whether they are features of national character, innate and indelible, and not traces of historic accident or fancies instilled in the course of political agitation. The perpetuation of weaknesses accidentally contracted cannot be wise for man or nation. The political idea which seems most characteristic is the tendency to personal leadership rather than to self-government or constitutional rule. But this has been common to all races in early times. It was fostered and prolonged by the circumstances of Irish history. It could hardly be pronounced incapable of modification by familiarity with free institutions.