Part 4 (1/2)
Other informal meetings between Sir Antony MacDonnell and the Irish leaders followed, the purpose of Sir Antony being, before he accepted office in the Irish Government, to gather the views of leading Irishmen, especially as to the possibility of a genuine land settlement, which he regarded as the foundation of all else.
Subsequently it transpired that Mr s.e.xton had engaged in some negotiations on his own account with Sir Antony MacDonnell, and it is not improbable that part at least of his quarrel with the Land Conference was that the settlement propounded by it superseded and supplanted his own scheme. Neither Mr O'Brien nor his friends were made aware of these private pourparlers, entered into without any vestige of authority from the Party or its leader, and they only learnt of them casually afterwards. The incident is instructive of how the path of the peacemaker is ever beset with difficulties, even from among his own household.
After surmounting a whole host of obstacles the Land Conference at long last a.s.sembled in the Mansion House, Dublin, on 20th December 1902. Mr Redmond submitted the final selection of the tenants'
representatives to a vote of the Irish Party and, with the exception of one member who declined to vote, the choice fell unanimously upon those named in Captain Shawe-Taylor's letter. Although their findings were subsequently subjected to much embittered attack, no one had any right to impugn their authority, capacity, judgment or intimate knowledge of the tenants' case.
The landlords' representatives were also fortunately chosen. The Earl of Dunraven was a man of the most statesmanlike comprehension, whose high patriotic purpose in all the intervening years has won for him an enduring and an honourable place in the history of his country. He strove to imbue his own landlord cla.s.s with a new vision of their duty and their destiny, and if only a few of the later converts to the national claim of Ireland had supported him when he came forward first, in favour of the policy of national reconciliation, many chapters of tragedy in our national life would never have been written. With a close knowledge of his labours and his personality I can write this of him--that a man more pa.s.sionately devoted to his country, more sincerely anxious to serve her highest interests, or more intrepid in pursuing the courses and supporting the causes he deems right, does not live. He has been a light in his generation and to his cla.s.s, and he deserves well of all men who admire a moral courage superior to all the shafts of shallow criticism and a patriotism which undoubtedly seeks the best, as he sees it, for the benefit of his country. And more than this cannot be said of the greatest patriot who ever lived. The Earl of Mayo also brought a fine idealism and high patriotism to the Conference Council Board. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the development of Irish industries and was the moving spirit in the Irish Arts and Crafts Exhibitions. Colonel Hutcheson-Poe, a gallant soldier, who had lost a leg in Kitchener's Soudan Campaign, a gentleman of sound judgment and excellent sense, was one of the moderating elements in the Conference. Finally, Colonel Nugent Everard represented one of the oldest Anglo-Irish families of the Pale and the author of several projects tending to the betterment of the people. The tenants' representatives presented a concise list of their own essential requirements as drafted by Mr O'Brien. It was as follows:--
BASIS.--ABOLITION OF DUAL OWNERs.h.i.+P
1. For landlords, net second-term income, less all outgoings.
2. For occupiers, reduction of not less than 20 per cent. in second-term rents or first-term correspondingly reduced. Decennial reductions to be retained.
3. Difference between landlords' terms and occupiers' terms to be made up by State bonus and reduced interest with, in addition, purchase money in cash and increased value for resale of mansion and demesne.
4. Complete settlement of evicted tenants' question an indispensable condition.
5. Special and drastic treatment for all congested districts in the country (as defined by the Bill of 1902).
6. Sales to be between parties or through official commissioners as parties would prefer.
7. Non-judicial and future tenants to be admitted.
8. (Query.) Sporting rights to be a matter of agreement.
I do not propose to go into any detailed account of what transpired at the sittings (six in number) of the Land Conference. All this information is available in Mr O'Brien's _An Olive Branch in Ireland_. Suffice it to say that seven out of eight of the tenants'
requirements were conceded outright and the eighth was covered by a compromise which would have enabled any tenant in the country, whether non-judicial or future tenants, to become the proprietor of his own holding on reasonable terms. On 4th January 1903 a unanimous report was published. The country scarcely expected this, and its joy at this ever-memorable achievement was correspondingly greater. It was inconceivable that the landlords should have, in solemn treaty, signed their own death warrant as territorialists, yet this was the amazing deed to which they affixed their sign manual when their four representatives signed the Land Conference Report.
Ever since the first Anglo-Norman set foot in Ireland and began to despoil the ancient clans of their land there has been trouble in connection with the Irish Land Question. The new race of landlords regarded their Irish land purely as a speculation, not as a home; they were in great part absentees, having no aim in Ireland beyond drawing their rents. They had no duties to their tenants in the sense that English landlords have. They had no natural ties with the country and they regarded themselves as free from all the duties or obligations of owners.h.i.+p. They never advanced capital for the improvement of the land or the erection of buildings, and never put a farthing into the cultivation of the soil. The tenant had to do everything out of his own sweat and blood--build his home and out-offices, clean and drain the land, make the fences, lay down the roads and, when he had done all this and made the property more valuable, his rent was raised on him, even beyond the value of the improvements he had effected. Woe to the industrious man, for he was taxed upon his industry! And yet who is not familiar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about ”the lazy Irish”? And if they were lazy--which I entirely deny--who made them so? Had they no justification for their ”laziness”? Why should they wear their lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should live in riotousness and debauchery in the h.e.l.ls of London or the Continent?
”One could count on one's fingers,” said the Cowper Commission in 1887, ”the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been made by the landlord.” The Irish landlord cla.s.s never did a thing for Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood--to rob and depopulate and destroy, to make exaction after exaction upon the industry of her peasants, until their wrongs cried aloud for redress, if not for vengeance. In England it was estimated in 1897 that the landlord cla.s.s had spent in investments in landlord property a sum estimated at 700,000,000. These can justly claim some right in the land. In Ireland the landlord was simply the owner of ”the raw earth”--the bare proprietor of the soil, a dead weight upon the industry and honest toil of the tenant, receiving a rent upon the values that the labour and the energy of generations of members of a particular family had created. The Irish landlord and his horde of hangers-on--his agents, his bailiffs, his process-servers, his bog-rangers, his rent-warners--created a system built upon corruption, maintained in tyranny, and enforced with all the ruthless severities of foreign laws enacted solely for the benefit of England's garrison. ”I can imagine no fault,” said Mr Arthur Balfour, speaking as Prime Minister in the House of Commons, 4th May 1903, ”attaching to any land system which does not attach to the Irish system.” Evictions in Ireland came to be known as ”sentences of death,” so cruel and numerous were they until the popular agitation was strong enough to check them.
Even the Gladstonian legislation of 1881, though it admittedly did something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as ”the three F.'s ”--viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale--yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants'
point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent farming, since the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw them. True, the tenant could claim for his improvements, but in practice this was no real safeguard. The more industrious the tenant the higher the rent--the less industrious and the less capable the lower the figure to be paid.
Hence, after the failure of countless Acts of Parliament, it was borne in upon all earnest land-reformers that there could be only one final and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual owners.h.i.+p--in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed owners.h.i.+p of the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885--called, after its author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense success, for in six years the ten millions sterling a.s.signed for its operations were exhausted and 25,867 tenants had been turned into owners of their farms.
It became clear that a scheme of purchase which would, within a definite period, root out the last vestige of landlordism was the one only real and true solution for the land problem. And now, blessed day, and glory to the eyes that had lived to see it, and undying honour to the men whose genius and sacrifices had made it possible, the decree had gone forth that end there must be to landlordism. And, wonder of wonders, the landlords themselves had agreed to the fiat decreeing their own extinction as a ruling caste. It was with heartfelt hope and relief, and with the sense of a great victory achieved, that the country received the wondrous news of the success of the Land Conference. The dawn of a glorious promise had broken through the long night of Ireland's suffering, but the mischief-makers were already at work to see that the noonday sun of happiness did not s.h.i.+ne too strongly or too steadily.
CHAPTER X
LAND PURCHASE AND A DETERMINED CAMPAIGN TO KILL IT
I can only rapidly sketch the events that followed the publication of the Land Conference Report. Mr s.e.xton made it his business in _The Freeman's Journal_ to decry its findings on the sinister ground that they offered too much to the landlords and were not sufficiently favourable to the tenants, sneering at the proposal for a bonus, hinting that no Government would find money for this purpose. Mr Davitt, who was an earnest disciple of Henry George's ideal of Land Nationalisation, naturally enough found nothing to like in the proposals for land purchase, which would set up a race of peasant-proprietors who would never consent to surrender their owners.h.i.+p to the State and would consequently make the application of the principles of Land Nationalisation for ever impossible in Ireland.
Besides, Michael Davitt had cause for personal hatred of landlordism, which exiled his parents after eviction, and incidentally meant the loss of an arm to himself, and a violence of language which would be excusable in him would not be justifiable or allowable in the cases of men who had not suffered similarly, such as Messrs Dillon and s.e.xton.
Yet the fault was not theirs if the Land Conference did not end in wreckage and such a glorious chance of national reconciliation and appeas.e.m.e.nt was not lost to Ireland.