“The landlord,” says Mr. Froude, “may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian Government has been called despotism, tempered by assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination.... Every circumstance combined in that country to exasperate the relations between landlord and tenant. The landlords were, for the most part, aliens in blood and in religion. They represented conquest and confiscation, and they had gone on from generation to generation with an indifference for the welfare of the people which would not have been tolerated in England or Scotland.”
English statesmen did not understand—did not try to understand—the Irish land question. They believed that force was the best—the only—remedy for agrarian disorders. They did not grasp the essential fact that rack-rents, insecurity of tenure, and the confiscation of the tenants' improvements by the landlords, lay at the root of the trouble, and that legislation to [pg 310] protect the tenant from injustice and oppression was the cure. The result was that the staple industry of the country was paralysed, and periodical famines, and constant outbursts of lawlessness and crime, almost threatened the very existence of society. No stronger argument can be used to prove the incompetence of Englishmen to rule Ireland, than the ignorance and incapacity shown by English statesmen throughout the nineteenth century, in dealing, or rather in refusing to deal, with this vital question of the land.
English statesmen saw nothing wrong in the exclusive establishment and endowment of the Church of the Protestant minority in a Catholic country, nor did they see just cause for complaint because Catholic peasants were forced, at the point of the bayonet, to pay tithes to Protestant parsons. Protestant education was assisted by the State. Nothing was done by the Government for the education of Catholics. Thus for the first twenty-eight years of the century the policy of the English in Ireland was calculated to embitter religious feelings, and to inflame national animosities. When Catholic emancipation (granted under the pressure of a great revolutionary agitation) came in 1829 it did not improve the situation because the people saw in it, not the measure of England's justice, but the measure of her fears.
II
All, then, that happened, between 1800 and 1829, served only to make the chasm which separated the two countries, deeper and wider. What happened between 1829 and 1835? I turn once more to my chronology:
1830. Arms Act.
1831-1832. Stanley's Arms Act.
1833-1834. Grey's Coercion Act.
1834-1835. Grey's Coercion (Continuance) Act amended.
Ireland remained as disaffected and disturbed as ever. Why? Because Catholic Emancipation (delayed for twenty-nine years), was, when carried, practically made a dead letter; the country was still governed, through the Protestant minority, in opposition to the opinions and feelings of the masses of the people; while the incompetence of Parliament to deal with the tithe question, and the land question, led to an agrarian and tithe war, which the Coercion Acts were powerless to stop. In 1831, indeed, Parliament had established the “national” schools, but the scheme was not what the people wanted. Protestants and Catholics alike desired denominational education, but the Government gave them a mixed system. For many years the system was worked (by a board consisting of five Protestants and two Catholics in a country where Catholics were to Protestants as four to one) in an anti-Irish spirit, and it failed, accordingly, to win popular support or confidence. In truth, the people saw in the “national” schools only institutions for anglicising the country. A Scotch Presbyterian practically managed the system. The books, with one exception, were prepared by Englishmen or Scotchmen. Irish history and national poetry were boycotted. Patriotic songs were suppressed. The limit of folly and absurdity was reached when Scott's “Breathes there a man” was replaced in one of the books by these lines: