FOOTNOTES:
[82] Total livestock in Ireland in 1874, 9,665,700; in 1883, 8,667,000.
[83] Decrease of acreage farmed in 1882—
| Cereal crops | 20,356 | acres. |
| Green crops | 21,072 | ” |
| Flax | 33,643 | ” |
| Meadow and Clover | 39,256 | ” |
| ——— | ||
| Total decrease | 114,327 | acres. |
Statesman’s Yearbook, 1883.
[84] “It forced properties to a general auction, to be sold for whatever they would bring, at a time when legislation had imposed new and unheard of burdens on landed property. At a time of unprecedented depression in the value of land, it called a general auction of Irish estates. English History records no more violent interference with vested interests than the provision by which this Statute forced the sale of a large portion of the landed property at a time no prudent man would have set up an acre to be sold by public competition.” (Tenant Right in Ireland, Butt, p. 881.)
“Estates that would have been well able to pay twice the encumbrances laid upon them, if property was at all near its ordinary level of value, now failed to realize enough to meet the mortgages, and the proprietors were devoted to ruin.... The tenants complain that they have gained little and lost much in the change from the old masters to the new.” (‘New Ireland,’ A. M. Sullivan, p. 88.)
At the sale of Lord Gort’s property thirteen years’ purchase was the maximum; many lots were sold at five. Some portions of the property since resold have fetched twenty-five and twenty-seven years’ purchase.
Excessive rack-renting has been attributed to sales under this iniquitous Encumbered Estates Act.
“In those sales persons buy small portions of property; of course their interest is to get as large a return as they can, and they think of nothing but an increase of rent.” (Minutes of Evidence, Lords Committee, 1867.)
[85] See Speech of Mr. W. H. Smith, M.P., Nov. 19, 1883, commencing “No country on the face of the earth has been so misunderstood and misgoverned as Ireland, &c.”
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
LITTLE GREATNESS.
M. Merimée writes:—
“That which strikes me most in the English politics of our own times, is its littleness. Everything in England is done with a view to keep place” (conserver les portefeuilles), “and they commit all possible faults in order to keep twenty or thirty doubtful votes. They only disquiet themselves about the present, and think nothing of the future.”
Unfortunately the littleness to which M. Merimée refers is not always attended with little results.
In his anxiety to secure the Irish votes, Mr. Gladstone, by his notorious Midlothian speeches, directly encouraged Irish demagogues to agitate.
His advice was followed, and the result has been, as every one expected, anarchy, murder, and assassination.[86]
Froude, the historian, writing in 1880, clearly predicated it:—
“Mr. Gladstone will not willingly allow himself to be foiled. Yet, if he perseveres, he may bring on the struggle so long foretold between democracy and the rights of property, and in a great empire like ours, with such enormous interests at stake, it is not difficult to foresee on which side the victory will be. However this may be, the apple of discord has been flung into Ireland, there to spread its poison.”[87]
Let us charitably hope that the results of Mr. Gladstone’s advice to agitate were not anticipated by him; but a man who will scatter sparks in a powder magazine cannot be held altogether guiltless of the results of the explosion that may ensue, whether he did it in ignorant folly or with culpable intent. Froude, alluding to the Midlothian speeches, says:—“No statesman who understood Ireland would ever have spoken of the ‘Upas Tree,’ unless he was prepared to sanction a revolution.” Mr. Gladstone must, therefore, be held morally responsible for the blood guiltiness—for the atrocious crimes and murders that have disgraced Ireland; he has sown the wind, and he has reaped the whirlwind; he has sown agitation, and reaped dynamite; he has not only caused anarchy by his advice, but has encouraged it by the weakness of his policy.[88]
An admirer of Mr. Gladstone writes in the Westminster Review, describing Mr. Parnell and his associates as “indispensable to the success of Mr. Gladstone!!” A fitting associate indeed in a work of legalized plunder is Mr. Parnell, whom Mr. Forster denounced in the House of Commons as the aider and abetter of assassins and murderers; who dared not stand up and answer the scathing denunciation, but slunk off to America like a whipped hound.