The tenant proceeded against (says Lord Clanricarde, owed four and a-half years' rent, at £47 8s. per annum) much below the taxation valuation of £67 19s., for a mill, with the sole use of the water-power, a valuable privilege, and 440 statute acres, a considerable part of them arable land. He had ten sub-tenants, was reported to make £500 per annum from mill and farm, and though he had removed part of his stock, there were still cattle on the land on the day of eviction enough to cover two years' arrears. If he had paid even those two years on account he would have received an abatement, and saved his farm. The judge in Dublin who gave the decree against him, gave also costs against him to mark his sense of the tenant's bad conduct."
And to think that good, honest, noble-hearted, and sincere Englishmen, who in their own persons are law-abiding, just, honourable, and faithful, should uphold a state of things which strikes at the root of all law, all commercial honesty—blinded as they are by the glamour of a generous, unreal, and unworkable sentiment! If only they would go over to Ireland to judge for themselves on the basis of facts, not fancies—and to be informed by truths not lies!
I know that we cannot all see alike, and that every shield has its two sides. In this matter, on the one side stand Earl Spencer, now converted to Home Rule, since his Viceroyalty; on the other is the example of Mr. Forster, who went to Ireland an ardent Home Ruler and came back as strong a Unionist. The Quaker became a fighting man, and the idealist a practical man, believing in facts as he had seen them and no longer in sentiments he could not realise—in measures grounded on the necessities of good government, and not like so many epiphytes with their roots in the air. Let Lord Spencer bring to this test his late utterances. He goes in now for Home Rule, and the right of Ireland to appoint her own police and judges. He is out of the wood and can hallo; but where would he have been if the Irish had appointed their police when he was at the Castle?—with Lord Frederick and Mr. Burke! And if the judges were appointed by the Irish, we should have, in all probability, Mr. Tim Harrington, barrister-at-law, on the bench; and a few years ago Mr. Tim Harrington crumpled up the Queen's writ and flung it out of the Court House window. And what power over the fortunes of others can be given to men who boycott a railway for political spite?[[G]]
So many things have conspired to make this Irish question a Gordian-knot which no man can untie, and but few would dare to cut. The past extravagance of the landlords, absenteeism, rack-renting, injustice of all kinds; the past jealousy of England and her over-shadowing all native industries and productions; difference of religion, racial temperament, and the irreconcilable enmity of the conquered towards the conquerors; ignorance and idleness; the morality which marries too early, when the land, which was just enough to support one family, is expected to keep three or four; want of self-respect in the dirt and disorder of domestic life; want of all communal life or amusement, save in heated politics and drink; bogs here, unthrift there, small holdings everywhere—all these things help to complicate a question which passion has already made too difficult for even the most radical kind of statesmanship to adjust. All the panaceas hitherto tried have been found ineffectual. The repeal of Catholic disabilities, the establishment of national schools, the disestablishment of the Protestant Church, the Maynooth grant, the various Land Acts—all have done but little towards the settlement of the question, which, like certain fabulous creatures, has increased in strength and the extensions of its demands by every concession made. The best chance yet offered seems to be in the quiet working of Lord Ashbourne's Act, by which the tenant becomes the owner and the landlord is not despoiled. And certainly the crying need of the moment is legislative finality and political rest. Existing machinery is sufficient for all the agrarian ameliorations demanded. To do much more would be to act like children who pluck up their seeds to see how they are growing, leaving nothing sufficient time for development or reproduction.
No one would deny such a measure of Home Rule to Ireland as should give her the management of her own internal affairs, in the same manner and degree as our County Councils are to manage ours. But this is not the Home Rule demanded by the leaders of the party. That for which they have taken off their coats means the loss of the country as an integral part of the Empire; the oppression and practical annihilation of the Protestant section; the opening of the Irish ports to all the enemies of England; or the breaking out of civil war in Ireland and its reconquest by England. The alternative scheme of federation is for the moment unworkable. But to hand over the whole conduct of Irish affairs to the Roman Catholic majority would be one of those ineffaceable political crimes the greatness of which would be equalled only by the magnitude of its mistake. The language of the indigenous Home Rulers and their Transatlantic sympathisers—as well as the things they have done and are still doing—ought to be warnings sufficiently strong to prevent such an act of folly and wickedness on our part. Even our men—men of light and leading like Mr. John Morley—seem to lose their heads when they approach the Irish question and to become as rabid in their accusations as the paid political agitators themselves. I will give these two short extracts, the one from Mr. Morley's speech at Glasgow, and the other from Lord Powerscourt's temperate and rational commentary:—
"Mr. Morley says," quotes Lord Powerscourt, "that the Irish people are more backward than the Scotch or English, which I venture to doubt, at least as regards intelligence, and gives as the reason:—
"'It is because the landlords, who have been their masters, have rack-rented them, have sunk them in poverty, have plundered their own improvements, have confiscated the fruits of their own industry, have done all that they could to degrade their manhood. That is why they are backward. (Cheers.) Will anybody deny that the Irish landlords are open to this great accusation and indictment? If anybody here is inclined to deny it, let him look at the reductions in rent that have been made since 1881 in the Land Court.'
"Well, have not rents in England and Scotland been reduced quite as much, nay, more, than Irish rents since 1881? And have not the economic causes which have lowered the prices of all farm produce all over Europe caused the same depreciation in the value of land in Germany or France, for instance, in the same ratio as in Ireland? And has not the importation of dead meat from America, Australia, or New Zealand had something to do with it?
"These facts are well known. But to return to the Irish landlords. Does not every one who is resident in Ireland, and therefore conversant with the state of affairs there for the last twenty or thirty years, know that the discontent and uprising against the land system is due to the action of a very few unjust persons, now mostly dead, but whose names are well known to any one who really knows Ireland, as I venture to maintain Mr. Morley does not? The principal actors in the drama could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And Mr. Morley, ex uno disce omnes, accuses the whole of the Irish proprietors of these cruel and unjust practices which we should scorn to be guilty of. And he is an ex-Cabinet Minister, and late Chief Secretary for Ireland for a few months, and a very popular one he was!
"He says, again: 'Public opinion would have checked the Irish landlords in their infatuated policy towards their tenants,' &c. He challenges denial of these charges. Well, I deny them most emphatically, and am quite willing to abide by the verdict of the respectable tenants. I throw back in his face the accusation that the Irish landlords as a body have rack-rented or plundered their tenants or confiscated their improvements.