The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of His Holiness Leo XIII. What I then and there learned convinced me that the Vatican was on the eve of grappling in Ireland with issues substantially identical with those which were forced, in my own country, two years ago, upon a most courageous and gifted member of the American Catholic hierarchy, the Archbishop of New York, by the open adhesion of an eminent Irish American ecclesiastic, the Rev. Dr. M‘Glynn, to the social revolution of which Mr. Henry George is the best-equipped and most indefatigable apostle. Entertaining this conviction (which events have since shown to have been well-founded), I was anxious to survey on the spot the conditions under which the conflict so vigorously encountered by the Archbishop in New York must be waged by the Vatican in Ireland.
To suppose that the Vatican, in dealing with this conflict, either in Ireland or in America, is troubling itself about the balancing of political acrobats, British or American, upon the tight-rope of “Home Rule,” is as absurd as it would have been to suppose that in 1885 the Vatican concerned itself with the subterranean intrigues which there is reason to believe the Irish Nationalists then sought to carry on with the wire-pullers of the two great British political parties. To get a correct perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year to make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with which they are perhaps only too familiar.
It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is just now the arena.
Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson, when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act of 1870, “the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators as tenants” had “abolished the class war waged between landlords and their tenantry.”
The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore, which is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a defensive war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an aggressive war, and of a war of conquest. In his able work on “The Land Tenure and the Land Classes of Ireland,” Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871, looked forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of land-holding, “whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what is good in the ‘landlord,’ or single middleman system, and in the peasant proprietary or direct system.”
What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation, steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation threatening not only the “co-existence” of these two systems, but the very existence of each of these systems.
To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look for them, not in Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr. Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.
In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone’s scheme of “practical politics,” the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by them, that “the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population.” By this the Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress of America since that time in wealth and population, this “assimilating power” reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original eastward current is by British public men.
In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards the American Republic, maintained that by two things the “heart of Ireland” might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British Empire. One of these two things was “perfect religious equality between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland.” The other was that the Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,—“first, the wrong of abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the improvements effected by the industry of his tenants.”
Perfect religious equality has since been estab lished between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland. The three wrongs which the Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.
Yet it is on all hands admitted that the “unity, solidity, and prosperity” of the British Empire have never been so seriously threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years. Was the Archbishop wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868? Or has the centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed to check a centrifugal advance “by leaps and bounds,” in the “assimilating power” of America upon Ireland?
Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy (the latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader Stephens, as “chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the British army”), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr. Davitt in a speech at Boston, and Mr. Devoy in a letter sent to the Freeman’s Journal in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that country.
The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a simple curate.
It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the Irish Felon:—
“The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation.”
This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land. If true of Ireland and the Irish people this proposition was true of all lands and of all peoples. Lalor, though more of a patriot than of a philosopher, saw this plainly; and in one of the three numbers of his paper which appeared before it was suppressed by the British Government, he said “the principle I propose goes to the foundations of Europe, and sooner or later will cause Europe to uprise.” Michael Davitt saw this as clearly in 1878 as Finton Lalor thirty years before. He had matured his plans in connection with this principle during the weary but not wasted years of his imprisonment as a Fenian at Dartmoor, a place, the name of which is connected in America with many odious memories of the second war between England and the United States; and going out to America almost immediately after his release on a ticket of leave, he there found the ideas of Finton Lalor and his associates of 1848, ripened and harvested in the mind of an American student of sociology, Henry George. Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls “the illegitimate development of private wealth” attained such proportions in modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too, in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in 1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on Progress and Poverty, which appeared in 1879. Dates are important from this point, as they will trace for the reader the formation of the strongest forces which, as I believe, are to-day at work to shape the future of Ireland, and, if Cardinal Manning is right, with the future of Ireland, the future of the British Empire.
The year 1878 saw the “Home Rule” movement in Irish politics brought to an almost ludicrous halt by the success of Mr. Parnell, then a young member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction, which there is reason to suppose was suggested to him by a friend who had studied the Congressional proceedings of the United States, the native country of his mother, and especially the tactics which had enabled Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, to check the so-called “Civil Rights Bill,” sent down by the Senate to that House, during a continuous session of forty-six hours and a half, with no fewer than seventy-seven calls of the house, in the month of January 1875, some time before Mr. Parnell first took his seat in the House of Commons.
When Mr. Parnell, early in 1878, thanks to this system, had ousted Mr. Butt, and got himself elected as President of the Irish “Home Rule Confederation,” he found himself, as an Irish friend of mine wrote to me at the time, in an awkward position. He had command of the “Home Rule” members at Westminster, but he had no notion what to do with them, and neither they nor he could see anyway open to securing a permanent hold upon the Irish voters. Three bad harvests in succession had thrown the Irish tenants into a state which disinclined them to make sacrifices for any sentimental policy, but prepared them to lend their ears eagerly to Michael Davitt, when, on his return from the United States in the early spring of 1879, he proclaimed anew, at Irishtown in his native county of Mayo, the gospel of 1848 giving the land of Ireland to the people of Ireland. Clearly Mr. Davitt held the winning card. As he frankly put the case to a special correspondent, whom I sent to see him, and whose report I published in New York, he saw that “the only issue upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land Question,” and of that question he took control. Naturally enough, Mr. Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr. Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund, such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883. In June 1879 he accepted the inevitable, and in a speech at Westport put himself with his parliamentary following and machinery at the service of the founder of the Irish Land League, uttering the keynote of Mr. Davitt’s “new departure” in his celebrated appeal to the Irish tenants to “keep a firm grip of their homesteads.” In the middle of October 1879, Mr. Davitt formally organised the Irish National Land League, “to reduce rack-rents and facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the land of Ireland by the occupiers,” and Mr. Parnell was made its first President. He was sent out to America in that capacity, at the end of the year to explain to the Irish-American leaders the importance of supplying the new organisation with funds sufficient to enable it to take and keep the field at Westminster with a force of paid members not dependent for their support upon the Irish constituencies. It was obviously impossible either to guarantee any considerable number of Irishmen holding property against loss by a policy aimed at the foundations of property, or to count upon finding for every Irish seat a member of local weight and stake, imbued with the spirit of martyrdom.
Mr. Parnell landed at New York on the 1st of January 1880. An interview with him, written out on board of the steamer which took him to America by a correspondent detailed for that purpose, was published on the morning after his arrival. It made on the whole an unfavourable impression in America, which was not improved by an in judicious quarrel into which he drifted with a portion of the American press, and which was distinctly deepened by his inexcusable misrepresentations of the conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough’s fund for the relief of Irish distress. The friends of Mr. Davitt in America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880, Mr. Parnell was not only “put through” the usual course of “receptions” by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an “off-day” to address the House of Representatives at Washington. His tour, however, on the whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield’s dissolution of Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical combination be tween the advocates of “the land for the people” on both sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82, publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question, while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by Mr. Gladstone’s Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under “suspicion” in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster’s officers, and was arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr. Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it was demonstrated by the incarceration of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, the disavowal, under pressure, of the no-rent manifesto by Archbishop Croke, and the suppression of the Land League. In sequestrating Mr. Davitt, Mr. Forster, as was shown by the extraordinary scenes which in the House of Commons followed his arrest, had struck at the core of the revolution, and had the Irish Secretary not been deserted by Mr. Gladstone, under influences which originated at Kilmainham, and were reinforced by the pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882, history might have had a very different tale to tell of the last six years in Ireland and in Great Britain. 6
It was after the return of Mr. George from Ireland to New York in 1882 that the first black point appeared on the horizon, of the conflict, inevitable in the nature of things, between the social revolution and the Catholic Church, which assumed such serious proportions two years ago in America, and which is now developing itself in Ireland. Among the ablest and the most earnest converts in America to the doctrine of the new social revolution was the Rev. Dr. M‘Glynn, a Catholic priest, standing in the front rank of his order in New York, in point alike of eloquence in the pulpit, and of influence in private life. Finding, like Michael Davitt, in the doctrine of Henry George an outcome and a confirmation of the principle laid down in 1848 for the liberation of Ireland by Finton Lalor, Dr. M‘Glynn threw himself ardently into the advocacy of that doctrine,—so ardently that in August 1882 the Prefect of the Propaganda, Cardinal Simeoni, found it necessary to invite the attention of Car dinal M‘Closkey, then Archbishop of New York, to speeches of Dr. M‘Glynn, reported in the Irish World of New York, as “containing propositions openly opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
It did not concern the Propaganda that these propositions ran on all-fours with the policy of the Irish Land League established by Mr. Davitt, and accepted by Mr. Parnell. What concerned the Propaganda in the propositions of Dr. M‘Glynn at New York in 1882 was precisely what concerns the Propaganda in the programme of Mr. Davitt as mismanaged by Mr. Dillon in Ireland in 1888—the incompatibility of these propositions, and of that programme, with the teachings of the Church.
Upon receiving the instructions of the Propaganda in August 1882, Cardinal M‘Closkey sent for Dr. M‘Glynn, and set the matter plainly before him. Dr. M‘Glynn professed regret for his errors, promised to abstain in future from political meetings, and begged the Cardinal to inform the authorities at Home of his intention to walk more circumspectly. The submission of Dr. M‘Glynn was approved at Rome, but it was gently intimated to him that it needed to be crowned by public reparation for the scandal he had caused. He disregarded this pastoral hint, and when the Archbishop Coadjutor of New York, Dr. Corrigan, went to Rome in 1883 to represent the Cardinal, who was unequal to the journey, he found the Propaganda by no means satisfied with the attitude of Dr. M‘Glynn. Two years after this, in October 1885, Cardinal M‘Closkey died, and Dr. Corrigan succeeded him as Archbishop of New York.
Between the first admonition given to the sacerdotal ally of Mr. George in 1882 and this event much had come to pass in Ireland. The Land League suppressed by Mr. Forster had been suffered to reappear as the National League by Earl Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan. Sir William Harcourt’s stringent and sweeping “Coercion Act” of July 11th, 1882, passed under the stress of the murders in the Phoenix Park, expiring by its own terms in July 1885, Mr. Gladstone found himself forced either to alienate a number of his Radical supporters by proposing a renewal of that Act, or to invite a catastrophe in Ireland by attempting to rule that country under “the ordinary law.”
He elected to escape from the dilemma by inviting a defeat in Parliament on a secondary question of the Budget. He went out of power on the 9th of June 1885, leaving Lord Salisbury to send the Earl of Carnarvon as Viceroy to Ireland, and the Irish party in Parliament to darken the air on both sides of the Atlantic with portentous intimations of a mysterious compact, under which they were to secure Home Rule for Ireland by establishing the Conservatives in their places at the general election in November. 7
What came of all this I may briefly rehearse. Going out to America in November 1885, and returning to England in January 1886, I remained in London long enough to assure myself, and to publish in America my conviction of the utter hopelessness of Mr. Gladstone’s “Home Rule” measure, the success of which would have made his government the ally and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr. Davitt, Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organisations of the United States. All this is matter of history.
The effect of Mr. Gladstone’s speech of April 8, 1886, introducing his Home Rule Bill, upon the Irish in America was simply intoxicating. They saw him, as in a vision, repeating for the benefit of Ireland at Dublin, on a grander scale, the impressive scene of his surrender in 1858 at Corfu of the Protectorate of the Ionian Islands to Greece.
Upon thousands also of Americans, interested more or less intelligently in British affairs, but neither familiar, nor caring to be, with the details of the political situation in Great Britain, this appearance of the British Premier, as the champion of Home Rule for Ireland, denouncing the “base ness and blackguardism” of Pitt and his accomplices, the framers of the Union of 1800, naturally produced a very profound impression. What might be almost called a “tidal wave” of sympathy with the Irish National League, and with him as its ally, made itself felt throughout the United States. Had I witnessed the drama from the far-off auditorium in New York, I might doubtless have shared the conviction of so many of my countrymen that we were about to behold the consummation tunefully anticipated so many years ago by John Quincy Adams, and—
“Proud of herself, victorious over fate,
See Erin rise, an independent state.”
The moment seemed propitious for a resolute forward move in America of Mr. Henry George, and the other American believers in the doctrine of “the land for the people.” It would have been more propitious had not the political managers of the Irish party, misapprehending to the last moment the drift of things in the British Parliament, and counting firmly upon a victory for Mr. Gladstone, either at Westminster or at the polls, insisted upon holding a great convention of the Irish in America at Chicago in August 1886. A proposition to do this had been made in the spring of 1885, and put off, in judicious deference to the disgust which many independent Americans of both parties then felt at the course pursued by Mr. Parnell’s friends, Mr. Egan and Mr. Sullivan in 1884, when these leaders openly led the Irish with drums beating and green flags flying out of the Democratic into the Republican camp.
As it was, however, Mr. Gladstone having gone out of power a second time, on the second day of June in 1886, the non-parliamentary and real leader in Ireland of the Irish revolutionary movement, Mr. Davitt, came overtly to the front, and crossed the Atlantic to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm at the Convention appointed to be held in Chicago on the 18th of August.
In New York he found Mr. Henry George quietly preparing to put the emotions of the moment to profit at the municipal election which was to occur in that city in November, and Dr. M‘Glynn more enamoured than ever of the doctrine of “the land for the people,” and more defiant than ever of the Propaganda and of his ecclesiastical superiors. It was resolved that Mr. George should come forward as a candidate for the mayoralty in November, and Dr. M‘Glynn determined to take the field in support of him.
We now come to close quarters.
Dr. Corrigan, as I have said, had become the Archbishop of New York in October 1885. The Irish-American Convention met at Chicago, Mr. Davitt dominating its proceedings by his courageous and outspoken support of his defeated Parliamentary allies in England. The candidacy of Mr. Henry George had not yet been announced in New York. But Dr. M‘Glynn resumed his practice of addressing public meetings in support of the doctrines of Mr. Davitt and of Henry George. The Archbishop’s duty was plain. It was not pleasant. A Catholic prelate of Irish blood living in New York might have been pardoned for avoiding, if he could, an open intervention at such a moment, to prevent an able and popular priest from disobeying his ecclesiastical superiors in his zeal for a doctrine hostile to “landlordism,” and cordially approved by the most influential of the Irish leaders.
But on the 21st August 1886, while all the Irishmen in New York were wild with excitement over the proceedings at Chicago, Archbishop Corrigan did his duty, and admonished Dr. M‘Glynn to restrain his political ardour. The admonition was thrown away. A month later, the canvass of Mr. Henry George being then fully opened, Dr. M‘Glynn sent Mr. George himself to wait upon the Archbishop with a note of introduction as his “very dear and valued friend,” in the hope of inducing the Archbishop to withdraw his inhibition and allow him to speak at a great meeting, then about to be held, of the supporters of Mr. George.
The Archbishop replied in a firm but friendly note, forbidding Dr. M‘Glynn “in the most positive manner” to attend the meeting referred to, or “any other political meeting whatever.”
Dr. M‘Glynn deliberately disobeyed this order, attended the meeting, and threw himself with ever increasing heat into the war against landlordism. On the 2d of October 1886, therefore, he was formally “suspended” from his priestly functions—nor has he ever since been permitted to resume them. Another priest presides over the great church of St. Stephen, of which he was the rector. More than once the door of repentance and return has been opened to him; but, I believe, he is still waging war in his own way, and beyond the precincts of the priesthood, both upon the right of private property in land and upon the Pope.
He is a man of vigorous intellect; and he has defined the issue between himself and the Church in language so terse and clear that I reproduce it here. It defines also the real issue of to-day between the Church speaking through the Papal Decree of April 20, 1888, and the National League of Ireland acting through the “Plan of Campaign.”
No heed having been paid by Dr. M‘Glynn to several successive intimations summoning him to go to Rome and explain his attitude, he finally, on the 20th of December 1886, wrote a letter in which, with a single skilful turn of his wrist, he took out the core of Henry George’s doctrine as to land, which really is the core also of the Irish Plan of Campaign, and thus laid it before the Archbishop of New York:—
“My doctrine about land has been made clear in speeches, in reports of interviews, and in published articles, and I repeat it here. I have taught, and I shall continue to teach in speeches and writings, as long as I live, that land is rightfully the property of the people in common, and that private ownership of land is against natural justice, no matter by what civil or ecclesiastical laws it may be sanctioned; and I would bring about instantly, if I could, such change of laws all over the world as would confiscate private property in land without one penny of compensation to the miscalled owners.”
There is no shuffling here. With logical precision Dr. M‘Glynn strips Mr. George’s doctrine of its technical disguise as a form of taxation, and presents it to the world as a simple Confiscation of Rents. Many acute critics of Progress and Poverty have failed to see that when Mr. George calls upon the State to take over to itself, and to its own uses, the whole annual rental value of the bare land of a country, the land, that is, irrespectively of improvements put upon it by man, he proposes not “a single tax upon land” at all, but an actual confiscation of the rental of the land—which for practical purposes is the land—to the uses of the State, without a levy, and without compensation to “the miscalled owners.”
When a tax is levied, the need by the State levying it of a certain sum of money must first be ascertained by competent authority, legislative or executive, as the case may be, and the law-making power must then, according to a prescribed form, enact that to raise such a sum a certain tax shall be levied on designated property or occupations. If the exigencies of the State are held to require it, a tax may be levied upon property of more than its value, as in the case, for example, of the customs duty which was imposed in one of our “tariff revisions” upon plate glass imported into the United States by way of “protecting” a single plate-glass factory then existing in the United States. This was an abominable abuse of a constitutional power, but it was not “confiscation.” What Henry George proposes is confiscation, as Dr. M‘Glynn plainly sees and courageously says. What he proposes is that the State shall compel the annual rental value of all land to be paid into the public treasury, without regard to the question whether the State does or does not need such a sum of money. That is confiscation pure and simple, the State, in the assumed interest of the State, proceeding against the private owners of land, or the “miscalled owners,” to use Dr. M‘Glynn’s significant phrase, precisely as under the feudal system the State proceeded against the private property of rebels and traitors. No good reason can be shown why the process should not be applied to personalty and to debts as well as to land.
This was the doctrine indorsed at the polls in New York in November 1886 by 68,000 voters. Nor can there be much doubt that it would have been indorsed by the few thousand more votes needed to defeat Mr. Hewitt, the actual Mayor of New York, and to put Mr. Henry George into the Chief Magistracy of the first city of the New World, had not its teachers and preachers been confronted by the quiet, cool, and determined prelate who met it as plainly as it was put. “Your letter,” said the Archbishop, “has brought the painful intelligence that you decline to go to Rome, and that you have taught, and will continue to teach, the injustice of private ownership of land, no matter by what laws of Church or State it may be sanctioned. In view of such declarations, to permit you to exercise the holy ministry would be manifestly wrong.”
In these few words of the Archbishop of New York, we have plainly affirmed in 1886 the principle underlying the Papal Decree of 1888 against the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting in Ireland. There is no question of parties or of politics in the one case or in the other. When Dr. M‘Glynn talked about the private ownership of land in New York as “against natural justice,” he flung himself not only against the Eighth Commandment and the teachings of the Catholic Church, touching the rights of property, but against the constitutions of the State of New York and of the United States. That “private property shall not be taken for public uses without just compensation” is a fundamental provision of the Constitution of the United States, which is itself a part of the Constitution of every State of the Union; and the right of private ownership in land is defined and protected beyond doubt or cavil in New York under the State Constitution. An Act passed in 1830 provides and declares that all lands within the State “are allodial, so that, subject only to the liability to escheat, the entire and absolute property is vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective estates.”
By this Act “all feudal tenures of every description, with all their incidents,” were “abolished.” Most of the “feudal incidents” of the socage tenure had been previously abolished by an Act passed in 1787, under the first Constitution of the State, adopted at Kingston in 1777, a year after the Declaration of American Independence; and socage tenure by fixed and determinate service, not military or variable by the lord at his will, had been adopted long before by an Act of the first Assembly of the Province of New York held in 1691 under the first Royal Governor, after the reconquest of the province from Holland, and in the reign of William and Mary. This Act provided that all lands should “be held in free and common socage according to the tenure of East Greenwich in England.” It is an interesting circumstance that the right of private ownership in land, thus rooted in our history, should have been defended against a threatening revolutionary movement in New York by the courage and loyalty to the Constitution of his country as well as to his Church of a Catholic Archbishop. For this same Assembly of the Province of New York in 1693, in an Act “to maintain Protestant ministers and churches,” enacted that “every Jesuit and popish priest” found in the Province after a certain day named, should be put into “perpetual imprisonment,” with the proviso that if he escaped and was retaken he should suffer death. And even in the Constitution of 1777 the Protestantism of New York expressed its hostility to the Catholic Church by exacting subjection “in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil.”
The position of the Archbishop, both as a churchman and as a citizen, was impregnable. When Dr. M‘Glynn advocated the plan of Henry George, he advocated at one and the same time the immoral seizure and confiscation of the whole income of many persons within the protection of the Constitution of New York, and the overthrow of the Constitution of that State and of the United States. It may be within the competency of the British Parliament to enact such a confiscation of rent without a revolution, there being not only no allodial tenure of land in Great Britain, but, it would appear, no limit to the power of a British Parliament over the lives, liberties, and property of British subjects, but the will of its members. But it is not within the competency of the Congress of the United States, or of the Assembly of New York, to do such a thing, the powers of these bodies being controlled and denned by written Constitutions, which can only be altered or amended in a prescribed manner and through prescribed and elaborate forms.
By the middle of October 1886 it became clear that Mr. George, whose candidacy had at first been regarded with indifference by the party managers, both Democratic and Republican, in New York, would command a vote certainly larger than that of one of these parties, and possibly larger than that of either of them. To put him at the head of a poll of three parties would elect him. This was so apparent that he and his friends, including Dr. M‘Glynn and Mr. Davitt, were warranted in expecting a victory.
It was hardly therefore by a mere coincidence that this precise time was selected for opening the war in Ireland against Rent. It is quite possible that if Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary friends had been in less of a hurry to open this war before the return of Mr. Davitt from America, it might have been opened in a manner less “politically stupid,” if not less “morally wrong.” But, of course, if Mr. Henry George had been elected Mayor of New York, as he came so near to being in November 1886, and Mr. Davitt had returned to Ireland with the prestige of contributing to place him in the municipal chair of the most important city in the New World, Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary friends would pro bably have found it necessary to accept a much less conspicuous part in the conduct of the campaign.
It was on the 17th of October 1886 that Mr. John Dillon, M.P., first promulgated the “Plan of Campaign” at Portumna, in a speech which was promptly flashed under the Atlantic to New York, there to feed the flame, already fanned by the eloquence of Dr. M‘Glynn, into a blaze of enthusiasm for the apostle of the New Gospel of Confiscation.
Had the “Plan of Campaign” then been met by the highest local authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as Henry George’s doctrine of Confiscation was met in New York by Archbishop Corrigan, it might never have been necessary to issue the Papal Decree of April 1888. But while the Bishop of Limerick unhesitatingly denounced the “Plan of Campaign” as “politically stupid and morally wrong,” the Archbishop of Dublin bestowed upon it what may be called a left-handed benediction. Admitting that it empowered one of the parties to a contract to “fix the terms on which that contract should continue in force,” the Archbishop actually condoned the claim of this immoral power by the tenant, on the ground that the same immoral power had been theretofore exercised by the landlord! Peter having robbed Paul from January to July, that is, Paul should be encouraged by his spiritual guides to rob Peter from July to January!
That the Catholic Church should even seem for a time to speak with two voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a disaster to the Church and to civilisation. From the moment therefore, in 1886, when the issue between Dr. M‘Glynn and the Archbishop of New York was defined, as I have shown, and the Irish National League, with a quasi-indorsement from the Archbishop of Dublin, had arrayed itself practically and openly on the side of Dr. M‘Glynn and against the Archbishop of New York, interests far transcending those of any political party in Ireland, in Great Britain, or in the United States, were involved. Unfortunately for the immediate and decisive settlement by Rome of the issue between Dr. M‘Glynn and the Archbishop of New York, a certain vague but therefore more vexatious measure of countenance had been given, before that issue was raised, to the theories of Mr. Henry George by another American prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, and by more than one eminent ecclesiastic in Europe. Of course this would have been impossible had these ecclesiastics penetrated, like Dr. M‘Glynn, to the heart of Mr. George’s contention, or discerned with the acumen of the Archbishop of New York the fundamental difference between any imaginable exercise of the power of taxation by a Constitutional Government, and Mr. George’s doctrine of the Confiscation of Rent. But this having occurred, it was inevitable that Rome, which has to deal with a world-wide and complex system of the most varied and delicate human affairs, should proceed in the matter with infinite patience and care. In January 1887 the Propaganda accordingly cabled thus to the Archbishop of New York,—Dr. M‘Glynn persisting in his refusal to go to Rome—“for prudential reasons Propaganda has heretofore postponed action in the case of Dr. M‘Glynn. The Sovereign Pontiff has now taken the matter into his own hands.”
In the hands of his Holiness the matter was safe; and in the Papal Decree of April 20, 1888, we have at once the most conclusive vindication of the wisdom and courage shown by the Archbishop of New York in 1886, and the most emphatic condemnation of the attitude assumed in 1886 by the Archbishop of Dublin.
It must not be assumed that Mr. George has been finally defeated in America. On the contrary, he was never more active. A legacy left to him by an Irish-American for the propagation of his doctrines has just been declared by the Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey, to be invalid on the ground that George’s doctrines are “in opposition to the laws”; and this decision has bred an uproar in the press which is reviving popular attention all over the country to the doctrines and to their author. He is astute, persevering, as much in earnest as Mr. Davitt, and as familiar with the weak points in the political machinery of the United States as is Mr. Davitt with the weak points in the political machinery of Great Britain. This is a Presidential year. The election of 1888 will be decided, as was the election of 1884, in New York. The Democratic party go into the contest with a New York candidate, President Cleveland, who was presented to the Convention at St. Louis for nomination, not by an Irishman from New York, but by an Irishman from the hopelessly Republican State of Pennsylvania, and whose renomination, distasteful to the Democratic Governor of the State, was also openly opposed by the Democratic Mayor of the city of New York, Mr. Hewitt, Mr. George’s successful competitor in the Municipal election of 1886. Leaving Dr. M‘Glynn to uphold the Confiscation of Land against the Pope in New York, as Mr. Davitt, Mr. Dillon, and a certain number of Irish priests uphold the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting against the Pope in Ireland, Mr. George supports President Cleveland, and in so doing cleverly makes a flank movement towards his “exclusive taxation of land,” by promoting, under the cover of “Revenue Reform,” an attack on the indirect taxation from which the Federal Revenues are now mainly derived. Meanwhile the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, who is also a political supporter of President Cleveland, has not yet been confronted by the supreme authority at Rome with such a final sentence upon the true nature of Mr. George’s “exclusive taxation of land,” as the clear-sighted Archbishop of New York is said to be seeking to obtain from the Holy Office. What the end will be I have little doubt. But for the moment, it will be seen, the situation in America is only less confused and troublesome than the situation in Ireland. It is confused and troubled too, as I have tried in this prologue to show, by forces identical in character with those which confuse and trouble the situation in Ireland.
Of the social conditions amid and against which those forces are working in America, I believe myself to have some knowledge.
To get an actual touch and living sense of the social conditions amid and against which they are working in Ireland was my object, I repeat, in making the visits, of which this book is a record. More than this I could not hope, in the time at my disposal, to do. With very much less than this, it appears to me, many persons, whose views of Irish affairs I had been inclined, before making these visits, to regard with respect, must have found it possible to rest content.
DUBLIN, Monday, Jan. 30, 1888.—I left London last night. The train was full of people going to attend levees and drawing-rooms about to be held at Dublin Castle.
Near Watford we lost half an hour by the breaking of a connecting-rod: but the London and North-Western is a model railway, and we ran alongside the pier at Holyhead exactly “on time.” There is no such railway travelling in America, excepting on the Pennsylvania Central; and the North-Western sleeping-carriages, if less monumental and elaborate than ours, are better ventilated, and certainly not less comfortable.
I had expected to come upon unusual things and people in Ireland, but I had not expected to travel thither in company with an Irish Jacobite. Two of my fellow-passengers, chatting as they smoked their cigarettes in the little vestibule between the cabins of the carriage, had much to say about Lord Ashburnham, and the “Order of the White Rose,” and the Grand Mass to be celebrated to-morrow morning at the Church of the Carmelites in London, in memory of Charles Edward Stuart, who died at Rome in 1788, and now lies buried as Charles III., King of Great Britain and Ireland, in the vaults of the Vatican, together with his father “James III.,” and his brother “Henry IX.” One of the two was as hot and earnest about the “Divine Right of Kings” as the parson who, less than forty years ago, preached a sermon to prove that the great cholera visitation of 1849 was a direct chastisement of the impiety of the Royal Mint in dropping the letters D.G. from the first florins of Queen Victoria issued in that year. He bewailed his sad fate in being called over to Ireland by family affairs at such a moment, and evidently did not know that the Mass in question had been countermanded by the Cardinal Archbishop.
The incident, odd enough in itself, interested me the more that yesterday, as it happens, the Cardinal had spoken with me of this curious affair.
He heard of it for the first time on Saturday, and, sending at once for the priest in charge of the Carmelite Church, forbade the celebration. Later on in the evening, two strangers came to the Archbishop’s house, and in great agitation besought him to allow the arrangements for the Mass to go on. He declined to do this, and sent them away impaled on a dilemma. “What you propose,” said the Cardinal, “is either a piece of theatrical tomfoolery, in which case it is unfit to be performed in a church, or it is flat treason, in which case you should be sent to the Tower!”
They went away, like the Senatus of Augsburg from the presence of Napoleon—“très mortifiés et peu contents.” After they had gone, the Cardinal remembered that for some time past queer documents had reached him through the post-office, setting forth the doctrine of Divine Right, and the story of the Stuarts. One of these, which with the rest he had thrown into the fire, was an elaborate genealogical chart, designed to show that the crowns of Great Britain and Ireland ought rightfully to be worn by a certain princess in Bavaria!
If there is anything more in all this than a new variety of the “blue China craze,” may it not be taken as a symptom of that vague but clearly growing dissatisfaction with the nineteenth century doctrine of government by mere majorities, which is by no means confined to Europe? This feeling underlies the “National Association” for getting a preamble put into the Constitution of the United States, “recognising Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in Civil Government.” There was such a recognition in the Articles of Confederation of 1781. Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia should have mentioned to His Holiness the existence of this Association, when he presented to Leo XIII., the other day at Rome, President Cleveland’s curious Jubilee gift of an emblazoned copy of what a Monsignore of my acquaintance calls “the godless American Constitution.” 8
We made a quick quiet passage to Kingstown. These boats—certainly the best appointed of their sort afloat—are owned, I find, in Dublin, and managed exclusively by their Irish owners, to whom the credit therefore belongs of making the mail service between Holyhead and Kingstown as admirable, in all respects, as the mail services between Dover and the Continental ports are not.
I landed at Kingstown with Lord Ernest Hamilton, M.P. for North Tyrone, with whom I have arranged an expedition to Gweedore in Donegal, one of the most ill-famed of the “congested districts” of Ireland, and just now made a point of special interest by the arrest of Father M‘Fadden, the parish priest of the place, for “criminally conspiring to compel and induce certain tenants not to fulfil their legal obligations.”
I could understand such a prosecution as this in America, where the Constitution makes it impossible even for Congress to pass laws “impairing the validity of contracts.” But as the British Parliament has been passing such laws for Ireland ever since Mr. Butt in 1870 raised the standard of Irish Land Reform under the name of Home Rule, it seems a little absurd, not to say Hibernian, of the British authorities to prosecute Father M‘Fadden merely for bettering their own instruction in his own way. I could better understand a prosecution of Father M‘Fadden on such grounds by the authorities of his own Church.
A step from the boat at Kingstown puts you into the train for Dublin. Before we got into motion, a weird shape as of one just escaped from the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill peered in at the window, inviting us to buy the morning papers, or a copy of “the greatest book ever published, ‘Paddy at Home!’” This proved to be a translation of M. de Mandat Grancey’s lively volume, Chez Paddy. The vendor, “Davy,” is one of the “chartered libertines” of Dublin. He is supposed to be, and I dare say is, a warm Nationalist, but he has a keen eye to business, and alertly suits his cries to his customers. Recognising the Conservative member for North Tyrone, he promptly recommended us to buy the Irish Times and the Express as “the two best papers in all Ireland.” But he smiled approval when I asked for the Freeman’s Journal also, in which I found a report of a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Davitt at Rathkeale, chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the Nationalist orators and newspapers. I am not surprised to see this. Mr. Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader, and no such man can stomach the frothy and foolish vituperation to which parliamentary agitators are addicted, not in Ireland only. Unlike Mr. Parnell, who is forced to have one voice for New York and Cincinnati, and another voice for Westminster, Mr. Davitt is free to be always avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make him popular. Calling Mr. Forster “Buckshot” Forster did him no harm. On the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr. Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland. We hear a great deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had the wit to see that it was his “good heart” which brought Louis XVI. to the scaffold.
Nobody who had not learned from the speeches made in England, and the cable despatches sent to America, that freedom of speech and of the press has been brutally trampled under foot in Ireland by a “Coercion” Government would ever suspect it from reading the Dublin papers which I this morning bought.
As a Democratic journalist I had some practical knowledge of a true “Coercion” government in America a quarter of a century ago. The American editor who had ventured in 1862 to publish in a New York or Philadelphia newspaper a letter from Washington, speaking of the Unionist Government by President Lincoln, as the letter from London published to-day in the Freeman’s Journal speaks of the Unionist Government of Lord Salisbury, would have found himself in one of the casemates of Fort Lafayette within twenty-four hours. Our Republican rulers acted upon the maxim laid down by Mr. Tilden’s friend, Montgomery Blair, 9 that “to await the results of slow judicial prosecution is to allow crime to be consummated, with the expectation of subsequent punishment, instead of preventing its accomplishment by prompt and direct interference.” Perhaps Americans take their Government more seriously than Englishmen do. Certainly we stand by it more sternly in bad weather. Even so good a Constitutionalist as Professor Parsons at Harvard, I remember, when a student asked him if he would not suspend the Habeas Corpus in the case of a man caught hauling down the American flag, promptly replied, “I would not suspend the Habeas Corpus; I would suspend the Corpus.”
We found no “hansoms” at the Dublin Station, only “outside cars,” and cabs much neater than the London four-wheelers. One of these brought us at a good pace to Maple’s Hotel in Kildare Street, a large, old-fashioned but clean and comfortable house. My windows look down upon a stately edifice of stone erecting on Kildare Street for all sorts of educational and “exhibitional” purposes, with the help of an Imperial grant, I am told, and to be called the Leinster Hall. The style is decidedly composite, with colonnades and loggie and domes and porticos, and recalls the ancient Roman buildings depicted in that fresco of a belated slave-girl knocking at her mistress’s door which with its companion pieces is fast fading away upon the walls of the “House of Livia” on the Palatine.
At one end of this street is the fashionable and hospitable Kildare Street Club; at the other the Shelburne Hotel, known to all Americans. This seems to have been “furbished-up” since I last saw it. There, for the last time as it proved, I saw and had speech of my friend of many years, the prince of all preachers in our time, Father Burke of Tallaght and of San Clemente.
I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a day, on my way to America, to see him. He came betimes, to find me almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron. The surgeon whom the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called the “heroic treatment” on my telling him that I had no time to be ill, but must spend that day with Father Burke, dine that night with Mr. Irving and Mr. Toole, and go on the next day to America.
“What has this Inquisitor done to you?” queried Father Tom.
“Cauterised me with chloroform.”
“Oh! that’s a modern improvement! Let me see—” and, scrutinising the results, he said, with a merry twinkle in his deep, dark eyes—“I see how it is! They brought you a veterinary!”
This was in 1878. On that too brief, delightful morning, we talked of all things—supralunar, lunar, and sublunary. Much of Wales, I remember, where he had been making a visit. “A glorious country,” he said, “and the Welsh would have been Irish, only they lost the faith.” Full of love for Ireland as he was, he was beginning then to be troubled by symptoms in the Nationalist movement, which could not be regarded with composure by one who, in his youth at Rome, had seen, with me, the devil of extremes drive Italy down a steep place into the sea.
Five years afterwards I landed at Queenstown, in July 1883, intending to visit him at Tallaght. But when the letter which I sent to announce my coming reached the monastery, the staunchest Soldier of the Church in Ireland lay there literally “dead on the field of honour.” Chatham, in the House of Lords, John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives, fell in harness, but neither death so speaks to the heart as the simple and sublime self-sacrifice of the great Dominican, dragging himself from his dying bed into Dublin to spend the last splendour of his genius and his life for the starving children of the poor in Donegal.
What would I not give for an hour with him now!
After breakfast I went out to find Mr. Davitt, hoping he might suggest some way of seeing the Nationalist meeting on Wednesday night without undergoing the dismal penance of sitting out all the speeches. I wished also to ask him why at Rathkeale he talked about the Dunravens as “absentees.” He was born in Lord Lucan’s country, and may know little of Limerick, but he surely ought to know that Adare Manor was built of Irish materials, and by Irish workmen, under the eye of Lord Dunraven, all the finest ornamental work, both in wood and in stone, of the mansion, being done by local mechanics; and also that the present owners of Adare spend a large part of every year in the country, and are deservedly popular. He was not to be found at the National League headquarters, nor yet at the Imperial Hotel, which is his usual resort, as Morrison’s is the resort of Mr. Parnell. So I sent him a note through the Post-Office.
“You had better seal it with wax,” said a friend, in whose chambers I wrote it.
“Pray, why?”
“Oh! all the letters to well-known people that are not opened by the police are opened by the Nationalist clerks in the Post-Offices. ’Tis a way we’ve always had with us in Ireland!”
I had some difficulty in finding the local habitation of the “National League.” I had been told it was in O’Connell Street, and sharing the usual and foolish aversion of my sex to asking questions on the highway, I perambulated a good many streets and squares before I discovered that it has pleased the local authorities to unbaptize Sackville Street, “the finest thoroughfare in Europe,” and convert it into “O’Connell Street.” But they have failed so ignominiously that the National League finds itself obliged to put up a huge sign over its doorways, notifying all the world that the offices are not where they appear to be in Upper Sackville Street at all, but in “O’Connell Street.” The effect is as ludicrous as it is instructive. Oddly enough, they have not attempted to change the name of another thoroughfare which keeps green the “pious and immortal memory” of William III., dear to all who in England or America go in fear and horror of the scarlet woman that sitteth upon the seven hills! There is a fashion, too, in Dublin of putting images of little white horses into the fanlights over the doorways, which seems to smack of an undue reverence for the Protestant Succession and the House of Hanover.
What you expect is the thing you never find in Ireland. I had rather thoughtlessly taken it for granted the city would be agog with the great Morley reception which is to come off on Wednesday night. There is a good deal about it in the Freeman’s Journal to-day, but chiefly touching a sixpenny quarrel which has sprung up between the Reception Committee and the Trades Council over the alleged making of contracts by the Committee with “houses not employing members of the regular trades.”
For this the typos and others propose to “boycott” the Committee and the Reception and the Liberators from over the sea. From casual conversations I gather that there is much more popular interest in the release, on Wednesday, of Mr. T.D. Sullivan, ex-Lord Mayor, champion swimmer, M.P., poet, and patriot. A Nationalist acquaintance of mine tells me that in Tullamore Mr. Sullivan has been most prolific of poetry. He has composed a song which I am afraid will hardly please my Irish Nationalist friends in America:
“We are sons of Sister Isles,
Englishmen and Irishmen,
On our friendship Heaven smiles;
Tyrant’s schemes and Tory wiles
Ne’er shall make us foes again.”
There is to be a Drawing-Room, too, at the Castle on Wednesday night. One would not unnaturally gather from the “tall talk” in Parliament and the press that this conjuncture of a great popular demonstration in favour of Irish nationality, with a display of Dublin fashion doing homage to the alien despot, might be ominous of “bloody noses and cracked crowns.” Not a bit of it! I asked my jarvey, for instance, on an outside car this afternoon, whether he expected a row to result from these counter currents of the classes and the masses. “A row!” he replied, looking around at me in amazement. “A row is it? and what for would there be? Shure they’ll be through with the procession in time to see the carriages!”
Obviously he saw nothing in either show to offend anybody; though he could clearly understand that an intelligent citizen might be vexed if he found himself obliged to sacrifice one of them in order to fully enjoy the other.
Lady Londonderry, it seems, is not yet well enough to cross the Channel; but the Duchess of Marlborough, who is staying here with her nephew the Lord-Lieutenant, has volunteered to assist him in holding the Drawing-Room, whereupon a grave question has arisen in Court circles as to whether the full meed of honours due to a Vice-Queen regnant ought to be paid also to an ex-Vice-Queen. This is debated by the Dublin dames as hotly as official women in Washington fight over the eternal question of the relative precedence due to the wives of Senators and “Cabinet Ministers.” It will be a dark day for the democracy when women get the suffrage—and use it.
At luncheon to-day I met the Attorney-General, Mr. O’Brien, who, with prompt Irish hospitality, asked me to dine with him to-morrow night, and Mr. Wilson of the London Times, an able writer on Irish questions from the English point of view. Mr. Balfour, who was expected, did not appear, being detained by guests at his own residence in the Park.
I went to see him in the afternoon at the Castle, and found him in excellent spirits; certainly the mildest-mannered and most sensible despot who ever trampled in the dust the liberties of a free people. He was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him in speeches and in the press, and talked about it in a casual dreamy way which reminded me irresistibly of President Lincoln, whom, if in nothing else, he resembles alike in longanimity and in length of limb. He had seen Davitt’s caveat, filed at Rathkeale, against the foolishness of trying to frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad names. “Davitt is quite right,” he said, “the thing must be getting to be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take them to be. One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had to invent a special sign for the phrase ‘bloody and brutal Balfour,’ it is used so often in the speeches.” About the prosecution of Father M‘Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it had been ordered. This he showed me. If the first duty of a government is to govern, which is the American if not the English way of looking at it, Father M‘Fadden must have meant to get himself into trouble when he used such language as this to his people: “I am the law in Gweedore; I despise the recent Coercion Act; if I got a summons to-morrow, I would not obey it.” From language like this to the attitude of Father M‘Glynn in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is but an easy and an inevitable step.
Neither “Home Rule” nor any other “Rule” can exist in a country in which men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an attitude. It is just the attitude of the “Comeouters” in New England during my college days at Harvard, when Parker Pillsbury and Stephen Foster used to saw wood and blow horns on the steps of the meeting-houses during service, in order to free their consciences “and protest against the Sabbatarian laws.”
To see a Catholic priest assume this attitude is almost as amazing as to see an educated Englishman like Mr. Wilfrid Blunt trying to persuade Irishmen that Mr. Balfour made him the confidant of a grisly scheme for doing sundry Irish leaders to death by maltreating them in prison.
I see with pleasure that the masculine instincts of Mr. Davitt led him to allude to this nonsense yesterday at Rathkeale in a half contemptuous way. Mr. Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and good feeling. “When I first heard of it,” he said, “I resented it, of course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr. Blunt’s character, and denounced it accordingly. What I have since learned leads me to fear that he really may have said something capable of being construed in this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the exasperation produced by finding himself locked up.”
I heard the story of Mr. Balfour’s meeting with Mr. Blunt very plainly and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House, in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of Britons as of Bedouins. In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to suppose it possible that Mr. Blunt can have really deceived himself as to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr. Balfour. This is paying a compliment to Mr. Blunt’s common sense at the expense of his imagination. In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt said yesterday of Mr. Blunts tale of horror, quite “open to question.” But, as Mr. Blunt himself has sung, “’Tis conscience makes us sinners, not our sin,” and I have no doubt the author of the Poems of Proteus really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own dark and bloody designs. Now that he finds himself struck down by the iron hand of this remorseless tyrant, why should he not cry aloud and warn, not Ireland alone, but humanity, against the appalling crimes meditated, not this time in the name of “Liberty,” but in the name of Order?
What especially struck me in talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in Ireland as a cock-pit. It is the condition of Ireland, and not the gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which is uppermost in his thoughts. This, I should say, is the best guarantee of his eventual success.
The weakest point of the modern English system of government by Cabinets surely is the evanescent tenure by which every Minister holds his place. Not only has the Cabinet itself no fixed term of office, being in truth but a Committee of the Legislature clothed with executive authority, but any member of the Cabinet may be forced by events or by intrigues to leave it. In this way Mr. Forster, when he filled the place now held by Mr. Balfour, found himself driven into resigning it by Mr. Gladstone’s indisposition or inability to resist the peremptory pressure put upon the British Premier at a critical moment by our own Government in the spring of 1882. Mr. Balfour is in no such peril, perhaps. He is more sure, I take it, of the support of Lord Salisbury and his colleagues than Mr. Forster ever was of the support of Mr. Gladstone; and the “Coercion” law which it is his duty to administer contains no such sweeping and despotic clause as that provision in Mr. Gladstone’s “Coercion Act” of 1881, under which persons claiming American citizenship were arrested and indefinitely locked up on “suspicion,” until it became necessary for our Government, even at the risk of war, to demand their trial or release.
But if Mr. Balfour were Chief Secretary for Ire land “on the American plan”; if he held his office, that is, for a fixed term of years, and cared nothing for a renewal of the lease, he could not be more pre-occupied than he seems to be with simply getting his executive duty done, or less pre-occupied than he seems to be with what may be thought of his way of getting it done. If all executive officers were of this strain, Parliamentary government might stand in the dock into which Prince Albert put it with more composure, and await the verdict with more confidence. Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to teach her—that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable, like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays. How well this lesson shall be taught must depend, of course, very much upon the quality of the men who make up the machine of Government in Ireland. That the Irish have almost as great a passion for office-holding as the Spanish, we long ago learned in New York, where the percentage of Irish office-holders considerably exceeds the percentage of Irish citizens. And as all the witnesses agree that the Irish Government has for years been to an inordinate degree a Government by patronage, there must doubtless be some reasonable ground for the very general impression that “the Castle” needs overhauling. It is not true, however, I find, although I have often heard it asserted in England, that the Irish Government is officered by Englishmen and Scotchmen exclusively. The murdered Mr. Burke certainly was not an Englishman; and there is an apparent predominance of Irishmen in the places of trust and power. That things at the Castle cannot be nearly so bad, moreover, as we in America are asked to believe, would seem to be demonstrated by the affectionate admiration with which Lord Spencer is now regarded by men like Mr. O’Brien, M.P., who only the other day seemed to regard him as an unfit survival of the Cities of the Plain. If what these men then said of him, and of the Castle generally, was even very partially true—or if being wholly false, these men believed it to be true—every man of them who now touches Lord Spencer’s hand is defiled, or defiles him.
But that concerns them. Their present attitude makes Lord Spencer a good witness when he declares that the Civil servants of the Crown in Ireland, called “the Castle,” are “diligent, desire to do their duty with impartiality, and to hold an even balance between opposing interests in Ireland,” and maintains that they “will act with impartiality and vigour if led by men who know their own minds, and desire to be firm in the Government of the country.” All this being true, Mr. Balfour ought to make his Government a success.
Mr. Balfour introduced me to Sir West Ridgway, the successor of Sir Redvers Buller, who has been rewarded for the great services he did his country in Asia, by being flung into this seething Irish stew. He takes it very composedly, though the climate does not suit him, he says; and has a quiet workmanlike way with him, which impresses one favourably at once.