Part 2 (1/2)

”Rossmore Agency Office, Monaghan.”

Here, then, is the reverse of the medal. Hitherto the outcry has been all for the tenant, and I do not say for a moment that this outcry was not just. It was. The Irish peasant has had his wrongs, deep and shameful; but now justice has been done to him so amply that the overflow has gone to the other side. It is time to look at things as they are, and to let well alone. Justice to the one has broadened out into persecution of the other, and an Irish landlord is for the moment the favourite c.o.c.k-shy for aggressive legislation. But, as I have said before, prejudice dies hard, and sentimental pity is often only prejudice in a satin cloak. The Irish peasant is still a.s.sumed to be a helpless victim, the Irish landlord a ruffianly tyrant; and a state of things as obsolete as the Ogham language itself still rouses active pa.s.sion as against a living wrong. I go back to that statement in the _Pall Matt Gazette,_ to which I have before alluded, as an instance of the way in which the very froth of prejudice and falsehood is whipped up into active poison by the short and easy way of imagination and a.s.sertion. It is a fair sample of all the rest; but these are the things which find credit with those who do not know and do not enquire.

Advocating the making of blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone's famous remedy of jam, this sapient ”B.O.N.” says:--

”The blackberry harvest would be over in the sunny Rhine country before it began in Ireland. Why should not some practical native, go over from home and see how it is all done? I quite know that any plan for bettering the physical condition of our people is open to the objection that as soon as they seem a little 'comfortable' the landlord would raise the rent in many a case; but perhaps in a still larger number of cases he would now be afraid to do so. And I know, too, that even a blackberry wine industry will not be quite safe till we have Home Rule; but is not that coming fast?”

This mischievous little word is in the very teeth of the fact that rents cannot be raised on any plea whatsoever--certainly not because the tenant makes himself better off by an industry other than his farming--and that the whole machinery of Government had been put in motion to protect the land tiller from the land-owner. Yet the _Pall Mall Gazette_ is not ashamed to lend itself to this lie on the chance of catching a few fluttering minds and nailing them to the mast of Home Rule on the false supposition that this means justice to the oppressed tenant and wholesome restraint of the brutal proprietor.

Professor Mahaffy, in a long letter to the _New York Independent,_ speaks of the same kind of thing still going on in America--this bolstering up a delusion by statements as far removed from the truth as that of ”B.O'N.'s,” to which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gives sanction and circulation. That part of the American press which is under the influence or control of the Irish Home Rulers still goes on talking of the oppression to which the Irish tenant is subjected, just as the speeches of the Agitators (_vide_ the astounding lies, as well as the appalling nonsense talked, when Lady Sandhurst and Mr. Stansfeld were made citizens of Dublin, and it was a.s.serted that the Government turned tail and fled before these ”delegates”) teem with a.n.a.logous a.s.sertions wherein not so much as one grain of truth is to be found.

Let it be again repeated in answer to all these falsehoods:--No tenant can be evicted except for non-payment of one year's rent; that rent can be settled by the courts, and if he has signed an agreement for an excessive payment, his agreement can be broken; and he must be compensated for all the improvements he has made or will swear that he has made. Also, he can borrow money from the Government at the lowest possible interest, and become the owner of his farm for less yearly payment than his former rent. He, the Irish tenant, is the most protected, the most favoured of all leaseholders in Europe or America, but the old cries are raised, the old watch-words are repeated, just as if nothing had been done since the days when he was as badly off as the Egyptian fellah, and was, in truth, between the devil and the deep sea. Let me repeat the legal and actual condition of things as summarized by Mr. Montagu Crackanthorpe, Q.C. These six propositions ought to be learned by heart before anyone allows himself to talk of Home Rule or the Irish question:--

1. That every yearly tenant of agricultural land valued at less than 50 a year can have his rent judicially fixed, and that the existence of arrears of rent creates no statutory obstacle whatever, nor any difficulty in procedure, if he is desirous of availing himself of the Acts.

2. That every such agricultural tenant, whether he has had a fair rent fixed or not, may sell his tenancy to the highest bidder whenever he desires to leave; and that, if he be evicted, he has the right either to redeem within six months, or to sell his tenancy within the same period to a purchaser, who can likewise redeem, and thus acquire all the privileges of the tenant.

3. That in view of the fall in agricultural produce, the Land Commission is empowered and directed to vary the rents fixed by the Land Court during the years 1881 to 1885, in accordance with the difference in prices of produce between those years and the years 1887 to 1889.

4. That no tenant in Ireland can be evicted by his landlord unless his rent is twelve months in arrear, and that the yearly tenant who is so evicted must be paid full compensation for all improvements not already compensated for by enjoyment, such, for instance, as unexhausted manure, permanent buildings, and reclamation of waste land. He may, it is true, be evicted on t.i.tle after judgment obtained against him for his rent, and in that case his goods and interest (including his improvements) may be put up to auction by the Sheriff.

This is a matter which seems to require amendment; but it is to be observed that the same consequences would follow if the judgment creditor were a shopkeeper who had given the tenant credit or the local money-lender or gombeen man. A compulsory sale under these circ.u.mstances is not peculiar to landlordism, and it is a method to which landlords seldom resort.

5. That if a tenant falls into arrear for rent, and becomes liable to eviction, whether on t.i.tle or not, the Court can stay process, if satisfied that his difficulty arises from no fault of his own, and can give him time to pay by instalments.

6. That if a tenant wishes to buy his holding, and comes to terms with his landlord, he can borrow money from the Government at 4 per cent., by the help of which he may change his rent into an annuity, the amount of the annuity being less than the rent, and the burden of the annuity altogether ceasing at the end of forty-nine years.

The result by the way of this peasant proprietors.h.i.+p will be twofold.

On the one side it will create a greater uniformity of comfort and a larger cla.s.s of peaceable, self-respecting, law-abiding citizens. On the other it will lower the general standard by doing away with that better cla.s.s of resident gentry and capitalized landowners, who in their way are guides, teachers and helps to the peasantry. The absence of this better cla.s.s of resident gentry is one of the misfortunes of French agricultural life and the justification of M. Zola; their presence is one of the blessings of England. How will it be in Ireland when the exodus is more complete than it is even now, and when the villages and rural districts are left solely to peasant proprietors and a celibate clergy? The Romish Church has never been famous for teaching those things which make for intellectual enlightenment and social improvement. The difference between the Protestant north and the rest of Roman Catholic Ireland, as between the Protestant and Romish cantons in Switzerland; is a truism almost proverbial. And without the little leaven of such influence as the better educated and more enlightened gentry may possess, the Irish peasant will be even more superst.i.tious, more blinded by prejudice and ignorance than he is now. As it is, the old landlords are sincerely deplored, and the good they did is as sincerely regretted. Those grand old hunting days, now things of the past, still linger in the memory of the men who partic.i.p.ated in the fun and had their full share of the crumbs--and the times when a grand seigneur paid a hundred pounds a week in wages alone seem something like glimpses into a railed and fenced off El Dorado, which the Plan of Campaign has closed for ever. So that the suns.h.i.+ne has its shadow, for all the good to be had from the light.

It ought to be that peasant proprietors.h.i.+p will make the holder more industrious and a better farmer than he has been as tenant. Whether it will or not remains to be seen. As things are--always excepting Ulster and the North generally--farming could scarcely be more shameful in its neglect than it is--domestic life could scarcely be more squalid, more savage, more filthy. Even rich farmers live like pigs and with their pigs, and the stone house is no better kept than the mud cabin--the forty-acre field no better tilled than the miserable little potato patch. Had the farming been better, there would never have been the poverty, the discontent, the agitation by which Ireland had been tortured and convulsed. Had the men been more industrious, the women cleaner and more deft, the Plan of Campaign would have failed for want of social nutriment, where now it has been so disastrously triumphant.

Physical well-being is a great incentive to quiet living--productive industry checks political unrest. Those who have something to lose are careful to keep it; and we may be sure that Captain Moonlight would not risk his skin if he had a good coat to cover it.

Also there is another aspect in which this land question may be viewed, and ought to be viewed--in reference to the manner in which the Irish farmer treats the property by which he lives:--that is the aspect of his duty to the community in his quality of producer for the community. We must all come down to the land as the common property of the human race. Parcelled out as it may be--by the mile or the square yard--it is the common mother of all men. We can do without everything else, from lace to marble--from statues to carriages--but food we must have; and the holders of land all the world over are really and rightfully trustees for the race. The Irish peasant has no more right to neglect the possibilities of produce than had William Rufus, or his modern representative in Scotland, to evict villages for the making of a deer forest. The principle of trustees.h.i.+p in the land holds good with small holders and great alike; but imagine what would be the effect of a law which required so much produce from a given area on an average for so long a period! The principle is of course conceded in the rent, rates and taxes; but a direct application to produce would set the kingdom in a blaze.

But in Ireland fields of thistles and acres of ragwort, with tall purple spikes of loose strife everywhere, seem to be held as valid crops, fit for food and good at rent-paying. These are to be found at every step from Dublin to Kerry, and the most unpractised eye can see the waste and neglect and unnecessary squalor of both land and people. As an English farmer said, with indignation: ”The land is brutally treated.” So it is--idleness, unthrift, and bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table on an acre of waste. Will the tiller, now the owner and no longer only the leaseholder, go back from his evil ways of thriftlessness and neglect, and instead of being content to live just above the line of starvation, will he educate himself up to those artificial wants which only industry can supply? Will the women learn to love cleanliness, to regard their men's rags and their children's dirt as their own dishonour, and to understand that womanhood has its share of duties in social and domestic life? Will the sense of beauty grow with the sense of proprietors.h.i.+p, and the filth of the present surroundings be replaced by a flower garden before the cottage--a creeper against the wall--a few pots of more delicate blooms in the window? Will the taste for variety in garden produce be enlarged, and plots of peas, beans, carrots, artichokes, pot-herbs, and the like, be added to the one monotonous potato-patch, with a few cabbages and roots for the baste, and a strip of oats as the sole cereal attempted?

Who knows? At present there is not a flower to be seen in the whole of the West, save those which a luxuriant Nature herself has sown and planted; and the immediate surroundings of the substantial farm-house, like those of the mud cabin, are filth unmentionable, savage squalor, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l neglect.

These things are signs of a mental and moral condition that goes deeper than the manifestation. They do not show only want of the sense of beauty--want of the sense even of cleanliness; they show the absence of all the civilizing influences--all the humanizing tendencies of modern society. By this want Ireland is made miserable and kept low in the scale of nations. Had the race been self-respecting, st.u.r.dy, upright, stubbornly industrious, all this savage neglect would have mended itself. Being what it is--excitable, imaginative, spasmodic, given over to ideas rather than to facts, and trusting to Hercules in the clouds rather than to its own brawny shoulders--this squalor continues and is not dependent on poverty.

Time alone will show whether changed agrarian conditions will alter it. So far as his power goes, the priest does nothing to touch it. The Church uses up its influence for everything but the practical purposes of work-a-day-life. It teaches obediences to its ordinances, but not civic virtues. It encourages boys and girls to marry at an age when they neither understand the responsibilities of life nor can support a family; but in its regard for the Sacrament it forgets the pauperization of the nation. It enforces chast.i.ty, but it winks at murder; it demands money for ma.s.ses for the souls of the dead, but it leaves on one side the homes and bodies of the living; it breeds a race of paupers to drag the country lower and lower into the depths of poverty, and thinks it has done a meritorious work, and one that calls for praise because of the paucity of numbers in the percentage of illegitimate births. Thus in Ireland, where everything is set askew, even morality has its drawbacks, and less individual virtue would be a distinct national gain.

The Home Rule enthusiasts say all that is wanted to remedy these ingrained defects is a Parliament; all that is wanted to make Irishmen perfect and Ireland a paradise is a Parliament chosen by the people and sitting in College Green. Human nature will then be changed, and the lion and the lamb will lie down together. The Papist will love the Protestant, and the moral of the story about those two Scotch Presbyterian boys, whose presence at the Barrow House National School so seriously disturbed both priest and people, is one that will read quite the other way. All the bitter hatred poured out against England, against Protestants, against the law and its administrators, will cease so soon as Catholics come to the place of power and the supremacy of England is at an end. The Church which burned Giordano Bruno and is affronted because his memory has been honoured--which placed the Quirinale under the ban of the lesser excommunication, and withstood the national impulse towards freedom and unity as represented by Garibaldi--the Church which has ever been on the side of intolerance and tyranny will suddenly, in Ireland under Home Rule, become beneficent, just, and liberal, and heretics will no longer herd with the goats but will take their place among the sheep. If, as Mr.

Redmond says, it is the duty of Irishmen to make the Government of England an impossibility, it will then be their pleasure to make her alliance both close and easy. Ulster and Kerry will march shoulder to shoulder, and Leaguers and Orangemen will form an unbroken phalanx of orderly and law-abiding citizens. In a word the old Dragon will be chained and the Millenium will come.

The prospect seems too good to be true. Were we to follow after it and put the loyal Protestant minority into the power of the anti-imperial Catholic majority in the hope of seeking peace and ensuing it, we might perchance be like the dog who let fall that piece of meat from between his teeth--losing the substance for shadow. We do better, all things considered, with our present arrangements--trusting to the imperfect operations of human law rather than shooting Niagara for the chance of the clear stream at the bottom.

The whirligig of Time has changed the relative positions of the two great parties in Ireland. Formerly it was the Catholics who desired the abolition of Home Rule, and the Protestants who held by the National Parliament. That Parliament was exclusively Protestant, and the powerful minority ground the helpless majority to the very ground.

Catholics were persecuted from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, and all sorts and conditions of Protestant bullies and tyrants sent up pet.i.tions to forbid the iniquity of Catholic trade rivalry. What was then would be now--changing the venue and putting the Catholics where the Protestants used to be. We do not believe that the ”principle of Nationality” is the working power of this desire for Home Rule, as Mr.

Stansfeld a.s.serts--unless indeed the principle of Nationality can be stretched so as to cover the self-aggrandizement of a party, the bitterness of religious hatred, and the tyranny of a cruel and coercive combination. The grand and n.o.ble name of Nationality can scarcely be made so elastic as this. Respect for law lies at the very heart of the principle, and the Irish Home Rulers are of all men the most conspicuous for their contempt of law and their bold infraction of the very elementary ordinances of civilized society.

As for tyranny, no coercion established by Government--not even that proclaimed by Mr. Gladstone--has been more stringent than the coercion exercised by the Plan of Campaign. What happened in Tipperary only the other day when certain rent-paying tenants, who had been boycotted, did public penance in the following propositions? They offered:--”Firstly, to come forward to the subsequent public meeting and express public contrition for having violated their resolution to hold out with the other tenants; secondly, not to pay the next half-year's rent, due on the 10th of December, but to in future act with the general body of the tenantry; and thirdly, to pay each a pecuniary sum, to be halved between the Ponsonby tenants and the Smith-Barry Tipperary tenantry in the fight which is to come on.”

Surely no humiliation was ever greater than this!--no decree of secret council or pitiless Vehmgericht were ever more ruthlessly imposed, more servilely obeyed! Can we say that the Irish are fit to be called freemen, or able to exercise the real functions of Nationality, when they can suffer themselves to be hounded like sheep and rated like dogs for the exercise of their own judgment and the performance of their duties as honest men and good citizens?