Mr. Dicey in his Case against Home Rule does me the honour to refer to an article which I wrote a year ago on "American Home Rule,"[24] expressing in one place "disagreement in the general conclusion to which the article is intended to lead," and in another "inability to follow the inference" which he supposes me to draw "against all attempts to enforce an unpopular law." Now the object of that article, I may be permitted to explain, was twofold. I desired, in the first place, to combat the notion which, it seemed to me, if I might judge from a great many of the speeches and articles on the Irish question, was widely diffused even among thoughtful Englishmen that the manner in which the Irish have expressed their discontent—that is, through outrage and disorder—was indicative of incapacity for self-government, and even imposed upon the Englishmen the duty, in the interest of morality (I think it was the Spectator who took this view), and as a disciplinary measure, of refusing to such a people the privilege of managing their own affairs. I tried to show by several noted examples occurring in this country that prolonged displays of lawlessness, and violence, and even
cruelty, such as the anti-rent movement in the State of New York, the Ku-Klux outrages in the South, and the persecution of Miss Prudence Crandall in Connecticut, were not inconsistent with the possession of marked political capacity. I suggested that it was hardly adult politics to take such things into consideration in passing on the expediency of conceding local self-government to a subject community. There was to me something almost childish in the arguments drawn from Irish lawlessness in the discussion of Home Rule, and in the moral importance attached by some Englishmen to the refusal to such wicked men as the Irish of the things they most desire. It is only in kindergartens, I said, that rulers are able to do equal and exact justice, and see that the naughty are brought to grief and the good made comfortable. Statesmen occupy themselves with the more serious business of curing discontent. They concern themselves but little, if at all, with the question whether it might not be manifested by less objectionable methods.
The Irish methods of manifesting it, I endeavoured to show, were not exceptional, and did not prove either inability to make laws or unwillingness to obey them. I illustrated this by examples drawn from the United States. I might, had I had more time and space, have made these examples still more numerous and striking. I might have given very good reasons for believing that, were Ireland a state in the American Union, there probably would not have been any rent paid in the island within the last fifty years, and that the armed resistance of the tenants would have had the open or secret sympathy of the great bulk of the American people. In truth, the importance of Irish crime as a political symptom is grossly exaggerated by English writers. I venture to assert that more murders unconnected with robbery are committed in the State of Kentucky in one year than in Ireland in ten, and the condition of some other Southern and Western States is
nearly as bad. All good Americans lament this and are ashamed of it, but it never enters into the heads of even the most lugubrious American moralists that Kentucky or any other State should be disfranchised and remanded to the condition of a Territory, because the offences against the person committed in it are so numerous, and the punishment of them, owing to popular sympathy or apathy, so difficult.
There are a great many Englishmen who think that when they show that Grattan's Parliament was a venal and somewhat disorderly body, which occasionally indulged in mixed metaphor, they have proved the impossibility of giving Ireland a Parliament now. But then, as they are obliged to admit, Walpole's Parliament was very corrupt, and no one would say that for that reason it would have been wise to suspend constitutional government in England in the eighteenth century. It is only through the pernicious habit of thinking of Irishmen as exceptions to all political rules that Grattan's Parliament is considered likely, had it lasted, to have come down to our time unreformed and unimproved.
Those have misunderstood me who suppose that I draw from the success of the anti-rent movement in this State between 1839 and 1846 an inference against "all attempts to enforce an unpopular law." Such was not by any means my object. What I sought to show by the history of this movement was that there was nothing peculiar or inexplicable in the hostility to rent-paying in Ireland. The rights of the New York landlords were as good in law and morals as the rights of the Irish landlords, and their mode of asserting them far superior. Moreover, those who resisted them were not men of a different race, religion, or nationality, and had, as Mr. Dicey says, "none of the excuses that can be urged in extenuation of half-starved tenants." Their mode of setting the law at defiance was exactly similar to that adopted by the Irish, and it was
persisted in for a period of ten years, or until they had secured a substantial victory. The history of the anti-rent agitation in New York also illustrates strikingly, as it seems to me, the perspicacity of a remark made, in substance, long ago by Mr. Disraeli, which, in my eyes at least, threw a great deal of light on the Irish problem, namely, that Ireland was suffering from suppressed revolution. As Mr. Dicey says, "The crises called revolutions are the ultimate and desperate cures for the fundamental disorganization of society. The issue of a revolutionary struggle shows what is the true sovereign power in the revolutionized state. So strong is the interest of mankind, at least in any European country, in favour of some sort of settled rule, that civil disturbance will, if left to itself, in general end in the supremacy of some power which by securing the safety at last gains the attachment of the people. The Reign of Terror begets the Empire; even wars of religion at last produce peace, albeit peace may be nothing better than the iron uniformity of despotism. Could Ireland have been left for any lengthened period to herself, some form of rule adapted to the needs of the country would in all probability have been established. Whether Protestants or Catholics would have been the predominant element in the State; whether the landlords would have held their own, or whether the English system of tenure would long ago have made way for one more in conformity with native traditions; whether hostile classes and races would at last have established some modus vivendi favourable to individual freedom, or whether despotism under some of its various forms would have been sanctioned by the acquiescence of its subjects, are matters of uncertain speculation. A conclusion which, though speculative, is far less uncertain, is that Ireland, if left absolutely to herself, would have arrived, like every other country, at some lasting settlement of her difficulties" (p. 87). That is to say, that in Ireland as in
New York the attempt to enforce unpopular land laws would have been abandoned, had local self-government existed. For "revolution" is, after all, only a fine name for the failure or refusal of the rulers of a country to persist in executing laws which the bulk of the population find obnoxious. When the popular hostility to the law is strong enough to make its execution impossible, as it was in New York in the rent affair, it is accepted as the respectable solution of a very troublesome problem. When, as in Ireland, it is strong enough to produce turbulence and disorder, but not strong enough to tire out and overcome the authorities, it simply ruins the political manners of the people. If the Irish landlords had had from the beginning to face the tenants single-handed and either hold them down by superior physical force, or come to terms with them as the New York landlords had to do, conditions of peace and good will would have assuredly been discovered long ago. The land question, in other words, would have been adjusted in accordance with "Irish ideas," that is, in some way satisfactory to the tenants. The very memory of the conflict would probably by this time have died out, and the two classes would be living in harmony on the common soil. If in New York, on the other hand, the Van Rensselaers and Livingstons had been able to secure the aid of martial law and of the Federal troops in asserting their claims, and in preventing local opinion having any influence whatever on the settlement of the dispute, there can be no doubt that a large portion of this State would to-day be as poor and as savage, and apparently as little fitted for the serious business of government, as the greater part of Ireland is.
There is, in truth, no reason to doubt that the idea of property in land, thoroughly accepted though it be in the United States, is nevertheless held under the same limitations as in the rest of the world. No matter what the law
may say in any country, in no country is the right of the landed proprietor in his acres as absolute as his right in his movables. A man may own as much land as he can purchase, and may assert his ownership in its most absolute form against one, two, or three occupants, but the minute he began to assert it against a large number of occupants, that is, to act as if his rights were such that he had only to buy a whole state or a whole island in order to be able to evict the entire population, he would find in America, as he finds in Ireland, that he cannot have the same title to land as to personal property. He would, for instance, if he tried to oust the people of a whole district or of a village from their homes on any plea of possession, or of a contract, find that he was going too far, and that no matter what the judges might say, or the sheriff might try to do for him, his legal position was worth very little to him. Consequently a large landlord in America, if he were lucky enough to get tenants at all, would be very chary indeed about quarrelling with more than one of them at a time. The tenants would no more submit to wholesale ejectment than the farmers in Missouri would submit some years ago to a tax levy on their property to pay county bonds given in aid of a railroad. The goods of some of them were seized, but a large body of them attended the sale armed with rifles, having previously issued a notice that the place would be very "unhealthy" for outside bidders.